Sunday 26 January 2014

Toddler group activity - cornflour in a tray...

This is a very simple but very messy activity!  The key to not having too much mess is planning.  A tray like this is so much easier than just a flat surface.  Also I put a mat underneath it.  The children wore aprons although in many of the cases they still got very floury! 

This was one pack of cornflour poured in to my good old Lakeland tray!  Cornflour feels lovely and soft on the hands. 


The children really enjoyed exploring and making patterns in the flour.


Some wrote letters/shapes/names.


The babies loved it too! 


Initially i didn't put anything else in the tray, the children later introduced some utensils themselves.



One baby decided he needed a closer look and crawled into the tray! 


Ann tried out our corn flour/conditioner play dough

Ann tried out this play dough from my previous blog with the children she cares for!  She said "The texture is lovely and it smells nice too." 


Do let me know if you try out any of the ideas on here, and let me know how they go!

https://www.facebook.com/Annschildmindingservice

Sunday 19 January 2014

Super soft playdough!

So last week we tried out a new recipe for playdough!  I am usually very reluctant to move away from my usual recipe which I use all the time and works well.  However this one promised to be silky soft so I thought we would try it for a change since it seemed very easy to do!

The ingredients are - corn flour, conditioner and some food colouring.


We used the cheapest conditioner we could find and stores own brand cornflour - together these came to under a pound.  So that is how much it costs to make this dough - food colouring we had in the house but the colouring is not necessary, it does however make it more interesting to play with.

The idea which I got from here - 
http://pagingfunmums.com/2013/11/01/soft-as-a-cloud-playdoughusing-only-2-ingredients/ 

stated the recipe should be 2 parts corn flour to one part conditioner.  Now for me this did not work at all! I ended up with more like a cup of corn flour to a bottle lid of conditioner.  I think this is going to vary wildly depending on the consistency of your conditioner.  So I would say add some corn flour then add a small bit of conditioner at a time and mix until it starts to become dough like! 

We used a whole box of corn flour and not even a 1/4 bottle of conditioner so we didn't need much at all.

I added the food colouring to the conditioner and mixed it in first to make sure the colour was distributed evenly. We did blue and pink.  


I have to say it is extremely soft and smells divine! And very nice to play with.  It can only be used with older children though due to conditioner not being edible.  

Over all I would say this is worth a try! It is nice for a change, but I still prefer my normal play dough recipe for moulding and making, this is not quite as good! 

Saturday 4 January 2014

Nail art

I love nail polish and nail stickers.  Got some new ones for Christmas so decided to try strawberry nails tonight!  This is good fun with older children who can sit still long enough!

Strawberry nails -


Giraffe nails - 


Flower and bee nails - 



And if you don't fancy drawing the picture yourself there are always nail art stickers available - 



Or even nail polishes that do the work for you - for example magnetic polish or crackle polish!