What a Mess

I love messy play but prefer to keep our really messy activities outdoors – easier to clean up and sometimes Mother Nature sends rain to help out.  Last week we tried to make a different type of play dough.

First we sorted fruity O cereal according to colour – some got eaten.  Then the children tried to crush the cereal using hammers, blocks of wood, and rolling pins.  Sorry, no pictures of this part as the children were working in various areas of the yard and I was busy trying to keep little hands from grabbing about-to-be-crushed-cereal.

The cereal proved to be much more difficult to crush than we had anticipated.  Certainly I could have tossed it in the food processor and made a fine powder but this was supposed to be an activitiy for the children.  They were content with the somewhat lumpy texture of partially crushed cereal.

Now we added some baking soda and water and mixed;

At this point I thought it looked like the stuff I clean off the floor after my cat eats her food too quickly.  Judging by the comments the children were making they were thinking the same thing;

From this point on I left it up to them what to do with their concoctions.

  

 

Interestingly, the toddlers were reluctant to participate.  The would occationally gently poke the gooey mess but then spend several minutes trying to remove the sticky goop from their finger.

I had just cut the grass the evening before so there was plenty of loose grass which I picked up and put on a tray.  The toddlers liked this;

The older children then began adding the grass to their goo – and the little ones were hooked;

This activity had the children engaged for nearly two hours and the results are still visible in my yard.  Seems the recent hot dry weather has baked the sugary creations into some sort of concrete.  Our own form of Oobleck coating the yard.

Now we have to experiment to discover how to get rid of this mess.