Saltwater Taffy Slime

We've seen all kinds of recipes lately for "fluffy" slime. Mixing up mysterious compounds and potions is always really high up on our kids' fun lists. And, as I mention in Banish Boredom, I love how much we get out of sensory play -- from the making to the playing to the cleaning (everybody and everything else) up, sensory activities are always a good solid chunk of play time. Plus, I really love any activity that incorporates both science and art. Anyway ... we decided to try out a fluffy slime recipe ourselves (thanks to Little Bins for Little Hands!).

After watching the kids mix, shape, and play for the better part of a morning (including taking a break to shower up!), I decided that we'd have to call this Saltwater Taffy Slime! Watching saltwater taffy being made along the New Jersey boardwalk is one of our fave summer vacation activities and this reminded me so much of the sweet treat. And since the recipe we followed uses saline solution, the saltwater idea really stuck.

It was an incredibly messy activity, but the kids loved every single part of it. The slime we made ended up being really, really sticky for much of the mixing process. But the kids actually been bickering a lot that morning, so I got a huge kick out of them two of them being literally stuck together while they worked to make the slime. It was perfect!

They let the slime sit for a bit while they cleaned up and it got less fluffy, but also less sticky. It turned much more like flubber than slime, but they loved that too. They popped air bubbles, rolled it out, and even bounced it.

If you're in need of a good mid-summer activity, give this one a try!

Spooky Sensory Recipes

I'm a big fan of sensory activities, an entire chapter of my book is on them in fact!, and we do them year round. But Halloween is a particularly perfect time to engage kids in spooky sensory fun. No matter what age our kids are, they love exploring slimy, gooey, and spooky materials. Here are a few of our favorites!

one / two / three / four / five 

DIY Tiedye Playdough Bath Soap

Our kids can smell the bathstore LUSH from miles away (who can't, really) and they are obsessed with their moldable soap. Its fantastic, but, like everything else in there, it's expensive. Now being a DIY veteran, I'm fully aware that "doing it yourself" often ends up costing far more in money and effort than simply sucking it up and buying it. BUT we found an incredibly easy recipe for playdough bath soap. Then we tie dyed it. BOOM. It's a snap to customize and you probably have all the ingredients all ready!

Icy Goop

We are no strangers to making goop (our basic recipe even made it into Banish Boredom), but I thought we could do a cool take on the activity to make a great combo of art, science, and sensory fun. Enter icy goop.

Valentine's Day Strawberry Sugar Scrub

We already checked off a new DIY Bath Product from our Winter Bucket List when we made a Salty Brown Sugar + Vanilla Body Scrub, but this winter weather is still doing a number on our skin. When Kane used up our last batch of body scrub this weekend, all H broke lose. Fortunately, they're incredibly easy to whip up and we decided to go with a fun Valentine's Day batch this time.

Spooky Oobleck!

My guys have been chomping at the bit to make a fall sensory project (see our favorites round up here) and I thought it would be fun to loop in a little science at the same time (it's on our Fall Bucket List after all!). So we decided to make a batch of spooky oobleck!

Sensory Play Recipes

Sensory recipes are our go to afternoon activity during the winter months -- the kids love making them and will spend hours playing. They've been especially helpful these last few weeks as I've been packing up the house to move. But we're a little sick of our old standbys and are on the lookout for new recipes. Anyone tried these?! 

1 / DIY Aqua Sand from Growing a Jeweled Rose. 

2 / Love this bright Baking Soda Dough.

3 / My sister recently made this polka dot slime with her son's Kindergarten class. I heard it was a hit! 

4 / Conditioner + corn starch = playdough?! Who knew? 

5 / Ocean swirl glitter slime!

Your Dough is My Dough: Frozen Playdough

We realized recently that the last time we made playdough was for St. Paddy's Day! How sad is that!? It makes mom feel like we're getting so old -- we used to make several different batches a week. In any event, we listed some new and creative playdough on our bucket list and when we spotted some recipes for frozen play dough on Pinterest, we knew we had to try it.

And we loved Growing A Jeweled Rose's idea of turning it into ice cream! Such a great way to cool off in the summer. We highly suggest playing with it outside. In bathing suits. Near a hose to spray everything and everyone down after! To make ours, you'll need:

- shaving cream (we used almost 2 cans to make 7 colors);
- gel food coloring (it blends easily without making the shaving cream melt);
- baking extracts (we used vanilla, almond, orange, and peppermint);
- containers;
- ice cream accessories (we used scoops, real toppings, and ice cream cones); and
- freezer space (for a few hours at least).

Let the kiddos spray the shaving cream into containers. Mix in a few drops of food coloring and extracts (FYI, we found that the extracts gave a little scent, but it still smelled like shaving cream!). Put the mixed cream into the freezer for at least a few hours. Once frozen, set up a little ice cream shop and go to town!

Your Dough is My Dough: Lemon Meringue Playdough

Mom's been using a lot of lemons for cooking lately (stay tuned for a pretty rad lemon olive chicken recipe) and so she's been stocking up on the citrus. One bulk batch started to turn more quickly than we could use for food (shocking, I know) and so we came up with a sweet lemon meringue playdough to use those suckers up. This smells ridiculously good and we recommend rolling it out while it's still warm. You'll want to crawl right inside it and take a nap.

Here's the deal. You'll need: 

- 4 cups flour
- 4 cups water
- 1 cup salt
- 2 tablespoons cooking oil
- 4 teaspoons cream of tartar
- yellow food coloring as you like

- grated rind from 2 lemons

- 1/4 tsp vanilla

- 1/2 tsp lemon extract 

Round those up and then: 

Combine all ingredients and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until most of the moisture is absorbed (it will take a bit). Let it cool on some wax paper. Store in airtight container.

cocktail mermaids like lemon meringue

so do dragons and knights

"cooking" with the dough

making a serious crust on some lemon meringue pie

Holidaze: Happy Spring Break, Passover, Easter, etc.

(um, yea, it's snowing on our first day of spring break. but we're going to pretend we're at the beach)

We know, we know. We've been absent. Neglectful really. But, we've been busy. No big wow of a reason. Just having a busy couple of weeks and our scribe (aka mom) had to let something slide. We're going to continue our little hiatus during our spring break this week, but we promise we'll be back with some new goodies soon.

In the meantime, here are some timely activities to keep your little's hands busy:

* Make some Passover playdough (not Kosher)

* Dip a bunch of naturally dyed easter eggs

* Make a tropical sensory tub OR, even better in our opinion, jump in a tropical bath

* Pretend you're actually having a warm spring break and make some popsicles

* Use all those egg cartons for some additional fun. Make egg carton flowers or a quick color scavenger hunt

* Older kiddos not into dying eggs? Save some and do a science experiment

* None of those strike your fancy? Check out our holidaze and artworks pages for a gazillion (no lie) other ideas.

Happy Everything to Everyone!

Your Dough is My Dough: Oatmeal Playdough

Oatmeal is one of our breakfast staples -- especially when the weather is chilly. But we are big fans of the fruit & cream variety (we love to "pick" our own flavor each time) and not the old school plain oats. So when mom recently made us black bean and quinoa veggie burgers (quick tangent -- this was a big mistake, mom. yes, some of our favorite items are separately black beans, corn, quinoa and oats. but you put all that mess together and call it a burger? what are you, new? that's great that you and dad loved it, because there were a lot of leftovers), we had a giant container of Quaker Oats quick oats left crowding up our pantry and we started scheming.

We first decided to have a spa day and make oatmeal masks. Then mom came to her senses and realized that we both flip out when she washes our hair and gets even a drop of water on our face. So washing off an oatmeal mask might not work out so well. A few quick googles later and we settled on oatmeal playdough. It took a bit of tinkering, but we thought the following recipe came out best: 

- 1 1/2 cups flour

- 2 cups quick oats

- 1 cup warm water

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl with hands until dough forms (we keep our flour in the freezer and got a kick out of mixing the cold flour and warm water together). If the dough is still too sticky for you, add some more flour until you get a nice, workable texture.

This turned out a super cool, yummy smelling, textured dough that even gave us a nice hand treatment while we played. Mom and Cam worked on an oatmeal zoo and I asked for wax paper to make oatmeal saltwater taffy. Not sure how long this will last for, we put it in the fridge and figure we'll get at least one more play out of it.

Holidaze: Valentine's Day Bath

Happy Valentine's Day! We kicked ours off early with a little surprise Valentine's themed bath last night -- we loved our tropical island tub so much a few weeks ago, mom couldn't resist setting up another. We knew she was up to something, but were still surprised to find pink, vanilla scented water surrounded by hearts, red streamers and all the pink/purple/red bath toys mom could round up. And Valentine's Day shaving cream tub paint complete with glitter (yes, there is STILL glitter in the tub). We played until we pruned.

In Home Entertainment: Glitter Paint Playdough

Back before we found our way to Discount School Supply (our favored art supply store), mom bought a bunch of supplies from Oriental Trading Company.  We love OTC and its prices, but the art supplies are not top-notch.  So we've had a big case of OTC glitter paint taking up space in our pantry for quite a while and mom decided it might make good coloring for playdough.  We made our usual batch of cooked dough, split it up and then mixed in a good amount of glitter paint.  The paint made the dough a little slimey, so mom had us add in a bit of flour as we mixed in the color.  We thought the colors turned out just like candy (more specifically, like the the candy making kit we saw on t.v. and have been begging mom to buy) and decided to run a little candy shop.

Cam focused on lollipops and cupcakes and I decided to make salt water taffy.  Mom gave me little squares of waxed paper and showed me how to roll up the candy.  Then I sold it to Cam.  We added in sequins the next time we brought it out to play and made some really fancy candy.  Mom also gave us some little candy paper cups to use, which we thought was super fun.  And you know Cami still tried to eat it.  

In Home Entertainment: Glow-in-the-Dark Water Beads

So, actually, the glow-in-the-dark part was kind of a FAIL.  The directions said to put the water beads in light for 5-7 hours and mom left them in the light for much longer than that, but they really didn't glow.  We tried them in our bath at night with no real dice.  That didn't stop us from having a good time, of course.  We asked for shaving cream (and then colored shaving cream) and glow sticks to "paint" with -- we even discovered that the glow sticks stuck to the shaving cream on the wall and we used those to "build" shapes.  The water beads didn't glow much out of the bath either.  Mom said they worked slightly better under the black light, but obviously she didn't want to put that close to the bathtub.  Good thing a water bead bath is fun all on its own!

impossible to take pics in the dark, but i'm making shapes on the shaving cream here.