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.

Simple Small Worlds: Butterfly World

You can read about our other Simple Small Worlds here:

Fizzing Hidden Ocean World

Froggy World

Insect World

Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud

Farm World

Dragon World

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I knew I wanted to make a second small world based off of our Insect TOOBcreatures, and since we love butterflies (and raise them every year!), what better world to make than Butterfly World?

Our Michaels store is constantly running specials on their faux flowers, so I waited until these brightly colored gerber daisies were two for $1 and bought several in purple, white, yellow, and pink.  S loves having different sensory materials in her worlds, so I settled on using some fresh green grass and adding a little pond.  And of course we used our Dollar Tree gems, because, well, we almost always use our Dollar Tree gems.  :)

At first, I cut the stems of the flowers to the height I wanted.  But then I saw S bending the stems and realized that because they had wire inside and I could bend them to the correct height!  Thank goodness for S!  So I bent the remaining flowers and stabilized them with tape throughout the world.  I left an opening in the center for the butterfly's pond.

 A quick trip to the backyard with a grocery bag yielded the grass necessary and we added a few drops of blue liquid watercolors to make the pond especially blue (you could instead use blue food coloring).  S required gems both in the pond and randomly scattered throughout the world.  It was then ready to be populated by our guests - a few creatures from our Safari Ltd Insect TOOB and one rogue Monarch (from a really cool Safari Ltd Life Cycle of a Monarch Butterfly set we used to learn about Raising Butterflies).

S immediately set to work storytelling, as is always the case with our small world set ups.  The butterflies in Butterfly World lived on the flowers and needed to make beds because they were sleepy.  They also needed to bathe in the pond (there's a lot of sleeping and bathing that goes on in our small worlds - they are for sure recurring themes).

The butterflies would fly down into the grass, gather wingfuls of it, and transfer them to the flowers.

They also loved including a gem or two in each of their beds.  To decorate, of course.

Blue butterfly was pretty serious about constructing her bed/nest.  I was so impressed with how much these flowers held - there were 2-3 gems and a giant pile of grass on most of them, and there was no bending or falling!

Blue butterfly really has a serious bed happening there.  I bet that fluffy grass is extra cozy.

S had so much fun with the grass - and after not too long, little X woke up from his nap.

And he also loved the grass!

Luckily he was content to sit with his own giant pile of grass for dumping and just observe all the nest/house building that was going on.

Once the butterflies were all content and sleeping soundly, S moved on to making houses for the "little buggy guys" that were in the world, lest they feel left out.

For more butterfly fun, check out our posts on Raising Butterflies and Making Your Own Butterfly Wings!

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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.