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.

Rainbow Foam Dough

Like many sensory materials, this one has several names.  I've seen it all over, but from what I can tell it started with a mention by the Ooey Gooey Lady on Facebook and has been done by several bloggers at this point.  I always see this pin float by me on Pinterest - and now that I've played with the sensory material, I do think Foam Dough is the best name for it.  

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I was expecting it to be pretty fun, but WOW IS IT FUN.  You really ought to try it.  Because you will LOVE it.  We had one of S's grandmas staying with us this weekend and she and I just could not stop playing with this dough.  It's a safe bet that an activity is a total win if any adults around are just as engrossed with playing as the kid(s).   Now that I've hopefully convinced you to try it, I will warn you that it is messy.  Like really messy.  Maybe the messiest thing I've played with?  It cleaned up just fine for us, but I am thinking most people would rather play with this in a big bowl/tub/bin outside.  :)

Foam Dough has two ingredients in a roughly one to one ratio - cornstarch and shaving cream   I wanted to make rainbow Foam Dough, because, well - rainbows!!!!  So I started by coloring the shaving cream because I figured that would be easiest - I added liquid watercolors, but you could also use food coloring (this, coincidentally, is how we make Shaving Cream Paint).

Then I slowly added cornstarch to each cup and stirred until it started looking ever so slightly doughy.  We kept our dough on the wet side because it was so much fluffier.  The more cornstarch you add, the drier the dough, but it does lose some of that amazing foamy-puffy texture.  Ultimately I'd say our foam dough ended up being slightly more shaving cream than cornstarch.

 

It really is just so foamy and puffy and fluffy and AMAZING.  It's like touching a cloud or a marshmallow...or maybe a marshmallow cloud?  Anyway, the pictures simply do not do it justice.

You can roll it into pretty little balls.  S had her grandma and me on ball rolling duty - and then she would SMOOSH them.  :)

Smooooosh.

It really was such a blast and so unlike any other material we've played with.  Shaving cream is definitely not save to ingest, so poor little X had to sit this one out.  Maybe next year!

We sincerely hope you'll give this one a try - it is something you must experience!!!!

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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.

10+ Super Easy Sensory Plays

All of the plays in this series are:

Appropriate for all ages
Use two or fewer ingredients
Use ingredients commonly found in a home

My hope with this series was to remind everyone that play doesn't have to be complicated to be fun!  And for those of you who are new to sensory play - I wanted to give you some nice and easy ideas for starting up.

To read more details about each, please click on the links.   They will lead you to the complete post.  :)
As I add more Super Easy Sensory Plays, I will add them to this post!

Cornstarch and Water

Dirt and Worms

Ice and Warm Water

Oatmeal Textures

Soap Foam

Wet Cotton Balls

Baby Safe Cloud Dough

Water Play

Birdseed

Rice Play

Dried Pasta

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