I LOVE any activity that makes a mess. As fastidious as I am about our place being organized and clean, I adore any craft, game or project that gets messy. I revel in the paint stains on Soren's pants and shirts, the mud all over our shoes and am grateful for the memories (achem - pictures) these messes have created.
Most of this is from Sensory Play. A term I have blogged about so many times in the past. What is Sensory Play? Here is a quick definition from this site, housing TONS of sensory play activities:
“As humans, we have five senses through which we experience and explore our world. They are hearing, smell, touch, sight, and taste. As a parent, allowing your child to engage in play activities that appeal to their senses is important. Through sensory play, children can experience stimulation of their senses. Simply said, we engage in and understand life though the sensory information our senses pick up.”
Yesterdays sensory play-ish activity and one we do quite a bit around here - was watercolor painting the tub. This is a great one - it gives us the opportunity to talk about a lot of different things.
1. All the different types of colors
2. How we can mix them in the tub - in the water and on the brushes.
3. What we are drawing - why we are drawing it (faces and emotions are great for this - yesterday we talked about the Seasons, Momma is SO SO ready for Spring!)
4. Use our fingers to spread the colors around
5. Use suds to change the texture and look of the colors (adds some sparkle)
6. The best part - how to clean it up.
Clean up:
The watercolors are SO easy to clean up. We use Honest Co. products so they are super friendly for kiddos. With their all natural ingredients I don't worry too much about Soren helping and he is encouraged to do so. Make a mess? Gotta clean it up!
He grabs the brush and starts scrubbing. It seriously takes less than 5 minutes to clean up and he gets a bubble bath out of it. Everybody wins!