Dinosaurs and Frozen Sensory Snow

I saw this awesome recipe for Shivery Snow Dough from Learn with Play at Home a few months back and thought it was totally brilliant!  A freezing cold snow dough in the hot summer sounded just perfect.  I decided to make a different snow dough, but followed her add glitter and freeze steps.  :)  

I wanted to use something that crunched like snow, and I remembered the texture of slightly wet baking soda - the precursor to making  our baking soda shells in our Hidden Fizzing Ocean World (and also our Fizzing Treasure Rocks in Day 2 of our Leprechaun Treasure Hunt).

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So I took two boxes of baking soda and added just enough water that it looked like crumbly snow (I mixed by hand).  Then I added some glitter (of course) and popped it in the freezer.  S loved how cold it was, but it was pretty darn frozen.  We decided to add some water with our squeezy condiment bottlesto see if we could melt some of the "snow".

Adding the water started the melting process and you could break off little tiny melty snowballs.  It was then deemed ready for some dinosaurs!  Now these particular dinosaurs lead pretty adventurous lives.  If you are a regular reader, you'll recall they've been fossilized, caught in sticky mud, and frozen in gelatin.  Today was their first adventure in snow, though.  :)

Since the snow was made of baking soda, S wanted to try adding some vinegar (I know some of my readers have children who don't like the smell of vinegar - this play works perfectly well with water!  Vinegar is totally optional.)   We had fun watching the brief glittery burst of bubbles as the vinegar and baking soda reacted.

Then it was back to playing.  The vinegar/water made glittery lakes on either side of a frozen path.  The dinosaurs were taking many trips back and forth along the frozen path and sometimes falling into a lake on either side and needing S's assistance (apparently dinosaurs are not good swimmers)!

As the baking soda snow melted, it was so soft.  I was surprised to see how long the whole mixture stayed cold.  It was really quite cold even at two hours out (S REALLY liked this world and kept playing and playing and...you get the idea)!

The slurry that the melted baking soda made was reminiscent of cornstarch and water.  It was nice and goopy and drippy, which is extra fun for dramatic play.

As it melted, the frozen crumbles turned into more of a snowy sludge (it was still SO COLD!) and S could make patterns with her fingers and the dinosaurs could leave footprints (they quickly disappeared, but it was pretty cool).

So much fun - and baking soda is only 59 cents a box at the Dollar Tree!  What's not to love?  :)

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

Not a Fairy Garden - a Dinosaur Garden!

 This post is part of a series on Playspace Design.   Other posts in the series include:
Our Playroom

Our Reading Room

Our Art Room

DIY Outdoor Sound Wall
Natural Rock Play Space and Outdoor Kitchen

This is the second of four posts on our Backyard's Design.  One of the elements I wanted to have in our yard was a place for imaginary play.  When I was perusing Pinterest, I saw so many fabulous Fairy Gardens - but fairies are just not S's thing.  However, dinosaurs are.  So I settled on creating a Dinosaur Garden instead.   :)

First we needed to decide where in the yard to create this world/garden.  My mother was super instrumental in our entire backyard design.  She's got a background in landscape architecture, so she was full of helpful tips.  She suggested playing off a feature that was already present in our backyard.  We had these two huge tree stumps from trees that were damaged in an ice storm and had to be cut down - so we built from there.

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On either side of the tree trunks, we created large, wide mounds of dirt.  I really wanted a water feature for our Dinosaur Garden, but I didn't want to deal with standing water.  I'd seen aquarium rocks used to make trails in fairy gardens, so I settled on making a giant lake out of blue aquarium rocks(I bought them at a local pet store).  To make the lake I flattened one of the mounds and made sort of a crater that I filled in with the aquarium rocks.

Next we needed greenery.  I just love sedum in general, and it was the perfect addition here.  It looks so prehistoric, it has so many varied textures, and it's drought tolerant (who doesn't love a plant that rolls with you forgetting to water it, right?).  I bought three flats of sedum (at our local home improvement store they sell these large flats of sedum that look almost like a giant plant carpet) and we broke them up into several large clumps and laid them on top of our dirt.  We did all this a year ago - so by now the sedum has mostly filled in the gaps.  It is a type of groundcover, so if you aren't picky about some gaps the first year, you can save money by just planting spaced handfuls and they will fill in over time.

Finally, we needed some dinosaurs!  Safari Ltd makes some great dinosaur models,but we were a bit more frugal and I raided the local Goodwill.  I actually love the crazy faded plastic dinosaurs I found there!  They're pretty awesome.  S has decided that they are a family - there's the Dada in the background below, the Mama is the Triceratops in the foreground, and they have a baby (smaller) triceratops as well.  In addition to the large scale dinosaur family, I also bought a bag of tiny dinosaurs- half of which lived out here and the other half of which live inside our house and play in some of our small worlds.  I like the tiny guys because usually S sends her friends home with one or two (which is great - because you get so many in a set she's happy to share) and the tiny guys hide really well in the sedum.  :)

Here's another view of Dinosaur Lake.

There's S playing with a tiny dinosaur guy.

S LOVES her Dinosaur Garden.  She spends hours quietly chattering telling all sorts of stories, making them meals of grass and gravel, and generally having a great time.  It's such a fun addition to our backyard!  PS - Her cuteness in this picture melts my heart!!!!

Got a dinosaur lover?  For even more dinosaur fun, be sure to check out:

No Sew Dinosaur World Playmat

Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud Small World

Make Your Own Dinosaur Fossils

Frozen Gelatin Excavation

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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

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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.

Simple Small Worlds: Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud

You can read about our other Simple Small Worlds here:

Fizzing Hidden Ocean World

Froggy World

Insect World

Farm World

Dragon World

Butterfly World

This is running as a guest post at Train Up a Child.  Please click here to read all about our Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud small world!  :)