Painting the Bathroom Mirror

Other posts in this series include:

Golden Glitter Slime (and Dragons)

Pretend Baking:  Painting a 3D Cake

Baby/Toddler Colored Rice Art

10+ Ways to Use Fingerpaint

Make Your Own Puffy Paint Shirt
Starter Art Kit from Discount School Supply

When I first saw Growing a Jeweled Rose's post Paint the Sky, I thought mirror painting would be fun to try someday.  Then my friend Stephanie at Twodaloo recently posted her beautiful photos of the giant mirror her twins painted in her Fingerpaint and Mirrors post and we just had to try it, too!  But where to find a mirror?  We didn't have one and I didn't want to buy one just to paint it and have to deal with the hassle of storing it somewhere.  Then it dawned on me - our bathroom has a giant mirror!  I picked a time where I could devote my entire attention to watching S and staying within arms reach of her - and we painted our bathroom mirror!  

Please use close (within arms reach) adult supervision for a child of any age during this activity!

S was SO delighted to be able to hop up on the counter and paint away.  I think at first she thought I might be a little crazy - but then she really got into it.  

To ensure that our bathroom tile countertop stayed paint-free, I used a bed sheet and applied a strip of packing tape between the bottom of the mirror and the sheet to make a paint-proof barrier.  We used our newest favorite paints, Discount School Supply's Simply Washable Tempera (we bought these ourselves) because they are just as beautiful as they are washable.  We didn't have enough in the budget to buy all the colors, so we'd picked just three - magenta, apple green, and turquoise - and I put them in our Dollar Tree muffin tin and gave S a large handled paintbrushto set to work. True to our previous experiences with Discount School Supply's Colorations brand paints - these were the most beautiful, vibrant, and washable paints!  Please keep in mind that S is OBSESSED with mixing paints, so the odd colors you see as time progresses are her own creations made by mixing the bright and cheerful original pink, green, and blue together.  :)

At first, she was just interested in painting over her face and peeking around the paint.  But then she started telling and painting a story!  It was stormy out, and there was a giant purple storm cloud.  Then it started to rain!

Here she is caught in the rain!  Eek!  She's getting wet!  She painted a house for herself to the left there and she'd periodically duck in to dry off, then pop back out in the rain like a true Seattleite.

Then the story took a bit of a strange turn (as a 3.5 year old's stories so often do) and a jellyfish appeared.  In the sky, apparently.

The jellyfish was mean and looking for fish to sting!

Aw, look at that cute happy little fish!  Who would want to sting such a happy guy?

And after the jellyfish and the fish worked out their problems, S went back to telling stories about getting rained on and taking shelter in her house again.  :)

When S was done, we each took a damp paper towel and wiped down the mirror.  After that, I took one final damp paper towel and one Windex wipeand the mirror was as good as new.  We popped the sheet in the wash, bringing the total amount of time for cleaning up to about 3 minutes.  Surprisingly quick and easy!

Have you read about our other unusual painting adventure?

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Golden Glitter Slime (and Dragons)

Disclosure:  This is part of a series reviewing art supplies, specifically those from Discount School Supply, our favorite art supply company.  Some of the products reviewed are our own; some of the products reviewed were provided free of charge from Discount School Supply.  I will note which were provided for review within the series.  Though I was offered some of these products for free, the opinions offered are my own and were not swayed by the free products.  This post also includes some affiliate links to Amazon for your convenience.

Other posts in this series include:

Golden Glitter Slime (and Dragons)

Painting the Bathroom Mirror

Pretend Baking:  Painting a 3D Cake

Baby/Toddler Colored Rice Art

10+ Ways to Use Fingerpaint

Make Your Own Puffy Paint Shirt
Starter Art Kit from Discount School Supply

S and I love glitter.  I think that Discount School Supply must have sensed this, because they sent us three pounds of gold glitter.  We now have enough to last our entire lives, I suspect!  ;)  I wanted some way to showcase their beautiful glitter, and so we settled on making the MOST GLITTERY slime we'd ever created.  Because we love glitter so much, we usually include it in our slime.  But this time, we went for total. glitter. saturation.

Our favorite slime recipe is super simple:

1.5 cups Liquid Starch (we use the brand "StaFlo")

2 5oz bottles of glue (we prefer Elmer's Clear Glue to make a clear base slime)

You add those two ingredients to a bowl (this is a great plastic bowl we use frequently for our projects that I bought at the Dollar Tree) and mix.  It takes awhile for the slime to get, well, slime-y.  There's a long period that lasts several minutes where it's just stringy and gross, and you might feel like you did something wrong - but that's just the way it works.  Keep mixing (we like to just use our hands for the mixing) and in a few minutes, it will all gel and look like the finished product.  You can add liquid watercolors, food coloring, paint, glitter - really whatever you want to the slime to make it pretty.  :)  Here S is adding glitter herself, and the Colorations Glitter is slowly dispensing it.  You gotta love a glitter container that doesn't dump, right?

Well, we wanted to add some SERIOUS glitter, so I took the lid off and we DUMPED (probably somewhere around a cup of glitter).  Isn't is beautiful?  Discount School Supply makes plastic glitter (glass, metal, and latex-free!), so it's safer for kids, and I loved that it was square shaped.  Usually the glitter we run into is circular - so we enjoyed the deviation from the norm.

See what I mean about the stringy stage?  Gross looking, but it will come together in a few more minutes.  We decided to add some of our own personal yellow Liquid Watercolors (about a tablespoon) and about two tablespoons of the Make It Shimmer paint additive that Discount School Supply provided us.

Between the mountain of glitter and the Make It Shine additive, we created some amazing golden slime.  It really looked like liquid gold to us!

And like a great slime, it was super streeeeeetchy!

Since we super saturated it, there was a bit of glitter that ended up on our hands as we played and on the table where we were spreading/playing with the slime.  We don't mind glitter, so this didn't bother us, but if glitter makes you nervous, we'd recommend adding a small amount or skipping it altogether.  :)

In addition to being stretchy, slime is also sticky, as S so willingly demonstrates here.

Sticky, sticky!  It does eventually stretch and fall, but it's pretty fun to see it momentarily suspended upside down!

Once S was done mixing the slime and exploring its properties, we brought out the dragonsfor some small world slime play!

Slime is one of S's favorite mediums for small world play because you can bury guys, get them "stuck", easily position them, etc.  It is a very dramatic play medium.  :)

 You can even make slime bracelets.  :)

We were SO pleased with how golden and sparkly our slime turned out.  It keeps in a Ziploc bag for weeks, and has been pulled out every single day since we made it.  :)

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

{Guest Post} Felt Dinosaur Dress-Up Set

I've asked Dyan from And Next Comes L to guest post for me today.  I learned about her blog a few months ago when I started blogging and it's just plain awesome!  She has so many great ideas for fun and learning.  My two favorite posts of hers are her Invisible Letters Sensory Bins and her Gruffalo Inspired Sensory Board - they are SO creative! 

Hi!  My name is Dyan and I write the blog And Next Comes L.  I am a stay at home mom to two boys, J (age 3.5) and K (20 months), but I also teach piano out of my home.  I love to dabble in all things creative, but my blog focuses primarily on fun, educational sensory activities and homemade toys, like activities for the felt board or quiet books.  

I am so thrilled to be guest posting on Fun at Home With Kids today, especially since I have been following/stalking/admiring Asia's blog for awhile.  I stumbled across her blog when it had a mere 200 or so Facebook fans and instantly fell in love with it.

I have been wanting to make a dress up activity for the felt board for a long time, but I didn't want to do the typical, boring dress up doll.  However, I have come across dress up bears, but I was still longing for something different.  Something that would really appeal to my boys.  I was also looking for something cute and fun like the Mix and Match Monsters that I made.  J loves those monsters.  

Then it dawned on me: dinosaurs!  What kid doesn't love dinosaurs?!  So I came up with this dinosaur dress up activity for the felt board.

As is my usual style, I cut everything free hand and hot glued pieces where needed.  It was also a great way to use up some of my felt scraps.  The pieces I made included a large dinosaur, some shirts, pants, a skirt, a ballerina tutu, a vest, some hats and shoes, a pair of underwear, and accessories like sunglasses, a tie, and a bow.

The contents of this play set.

Put the pieces together and you can make some wonderful dinosaurs like these:

A rockin' ballerina.

An explorer.

A little "Risky Business", anyone?!

Well, J loves, loves, loves this dress up dinosaur.  In fact, J is becoming quite the master of the layering technique.

Shirt, underwear, and now some shoes.

Now for some pants.

And how about an upside down tutu?

As for K, he apparently had better things to do...

K is too busy with a calculator

Thank you to Asia for having me guest post today and thank you for reading.  Be sure to check out my blog And Next Comes L, join my Facebook page, or follow us on Pinterest.

Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Frozen Gelatin Fossil Excavation and Frozen Gelatin Sensory Play

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.

I've seen so many awesome posts on ice excavation lately, and I was wondering if I could come up with a twist on that when I thought of gelatin.  We had so much fun with our Gelatin Play and our Fizzing Gelatin that I thought it would be worth a shot at freezing gelatin to see what it would do.  We made the gelatin as normal, with one fabulous new step - oiling the cups we were using before pouring the gelatin in.  One of my awesome readers, Med, replicated our Gelatin Play here and solved my the-gelatin-sticks-to-the-cups problem by using cooking spray on the cups.  We used regular cooking oil and it's genius (thank you, Med!)!  So we oiled the cups, set our creatures inside, and poured the liquid unflavored gelatin mix (made following the directions on the box) and stored them in the fridge until they set (about 4 hours), then moved them to the freezer overnight.

It might have worked to move them immediately to the freezer, but I figured I'd hedge my bets by letting them set in the regular fashion first.   They come out looking really neat - just like a frozen fossil - don't you think?

And here's another shot of two "fossils" we excavated the following day.

I set S up with a foil covered cookie tray (with an edge to contain water - the foil was to make the clean up of the leftover gelatin easier), a spoon, a container of warm water, and three of our frozen creatures who needed her help!

S alternated between drizzling the warm water over the gelatin and dunking the gelatin in the water.  The outer edges of the gelatin began to defrost and left a crazy cool-to-the-touch layer of squishy thawed gelatin.  It seemed a bit tougher than regular gelatin - it actually reminded me a lot of the texture of water beads!

S would break chunks off with her hands and squish them around a bit.

You could really dig into it once it had defrosted a bit from the warm water.

Once enough of the gelatin had been defrosted and picked off - she could use her hands to pull ant out!

 A successful rescue!  Ant is free and ready for a warm bath (it was cold in his gelatinous confines!)

The frozen gelatin had a strange texture, as I mentioned above, and it also seemed to absorb water like a sponge.  You could squeeze the water out, then submerge it and do it all over again.  It was really weird, but fun enough that even I had to do it repeatedly!

Squeeeeeze!

Not to mention, the crystals of ice and gelatin were so pretty!

Since gelatin is edible (but rather gross plain, so don't eat it - ew), X got to join in on the fun.  I wouldn't bother freezing a creature to dig out in the gelatin for a baby - but plain frozen unflavored gelatin would definitely be a fun summer sensory experience for the little guys.

X had a lot of fun touching the rubbery outer layer (we gave him one that was slightly defrosted).

He really does make the best faces.  Here he's saying "ooh!" as he investigates a chunk of defrosted gelatin he's broken off.

The biggest "fossil" we made was using one of the dinosaur skeletons we'd used to make our Plaster Dinosaur Fossils - and he is a BIG guy.  He took two days to excavate, but S had a great time.  I loved that this activity lasted quite some time - several hours over two days.  When S tired of working at getting the big dinosaur out, I just popped him in the freezer for the next day.  For reference, she was interested/able to excavate two smaller fossils each day - and I was able to make the big dinosaur and four smaller fossils out of one small box (four packets) of unflavored gelatin.

If you've got a dinosaur fan at home, For even more dinosaur fun, be sure to check out our No Sew Dinosaur World Playmat and our Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud Small World!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.