Natural ingredients with Coloured Water in the Mud Kitchen

Our Mud Kitchen is honestly the best and most used kids play thing in our house, no toy compares. If you're considering making a mud kitchen for your children or a preschool, don't feel as if it will be limited to Mud only and messy play, there are so many ways to play in an "Outdoor Kitchen".
Sometimes Dimples asks to go play in the Mud Kitchen but I don't feel like cleaning up muddy clothes so instead of allowing him to get really messy I give him some containers filled with coloured water (tap water and a drop of food colouring) & we go on a hunt for natural cooking ingredients.

This is just as fun as making mud pies but without the mess. Miss Cherub enjoys tinkering in the coloured water just as much as Dimples enjoys making rose tea and Sweet gum nut soup.
In the past we have done some pretty messy Mud play in this Outdoor Kitchen; A Mud Rally Box full of cars and diggers,   Process Painting with Mud & Making a Mud Brick House. If you missed it I have also done a Post on Eight Benefits of Playing in the Mud, however the coloured water was a nice change.

Before making some colourful concoctions, Dimples and I fill up his orange buckets from the Renovated Mud Kitchen with Natural ingredients. Gumnuts, flowers, seeds, twigs, flower buds, and little bits and pieces found in the yard in preparation for his cooking session. Then he creates some beautiful concoctions, mixing together the colours and 'cooking' them, or boiling the water first then adding natural ingredients to stir through.

This type of play is so fresh and calming, Dimples and Miss Cherub could do this for hours. Actually, come to think of it they play happily together for a long time which doesn't occur to this extent in any other play space.  There is something very tranquil about enjoying the sunlight coming through the trees on to the outdoor mud kitchen while the two kiddies play silently together with beautiful flowers and colourful water. They  look so at peace in the world; nothing else matters. 

Dimples & Miss Cherub explore the outdoor environment, search for natural ingredients, experiment with mixing colours, use great imaginations to create and cook up a serve, they role play as they cook and serve me fabulous looking dishes, they are also getting the social advantages of turn taking, sharing, cooperating and playing together. They are also getting hands on experience as they stir, pour, sift, transfer, mix, lift, empty and measure out the water and ingredients.

 

Learning concepts:

Benefits of being outdoors

Exploring Nature

Mixing Colours

Gross Motor - They're always moving as they lift, pour, mix, transfer, measure, stir etc.

Role Playing real life

Imaginative Play

Social Skills - cooperation, sharing, turn taking, collaborating, working together & helping one another.

Happy Adventures 

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Mad Scientist Play - Colour Explosions

As a Mummy blogger I am a bits and bobs hoarder; Meaning I keep anything that has prospective crafting or activity purpose. Among my craft cupboards (yes there are many) I had a collection of empty bottles in different shapes and sizes from baby wash, hair conditioner, drink bottles, vases and so forth, plus squirts from hand washes and sprays from bench cleaners that I've rinsed out. I knew I would use them for something cool one day. Here it is!

In Australia its warming up, days are getting lighter and warmer for longer and so along with the Spring air comes lots of outdoors play. The usual bike riding, ball throwing, digging and playing around the yard is all good and fun but this afternoon I set up a mini science lab for Dimples to experiment with.

Dimples had 2 types of experiments to perform as a Mad scientist. I set up a plastic tub station of bottles, three bottles with white vinegar in them and a few drops of food colour, I chose our three prime colours so as they exploded out he would see them mix in the clear tray they sat in. Then in the other two (the vase and the tall bottle) I did a ratio of canola oil and coloured water for some lava lamp eruptions. We have done this before so Dimples knew exactly what to do.

Getting inspired by the set up and the brightly coloured bottles waiting he went and put on his dress up doctor kit, which became his Mad scientist suit, one of my caps that he dubbed a Mad Scientist cap and some clear safety glasses from Adventures Dads tool shed. He was set and ready.

Dimples first broke open some alka-sielter tablets (you know those tablets that are for upset stomachs, you probably have some in the medicine cabinet) and dropped them into the oil filled bottles. See above. The tablet sinks to the water then it fizzes away in the water which makes the coloured water bubble up and erupt into the oil in blobs but as we know it doesn't mix, so it makes it look like a lava eruption. Pretty cool. Dimples had a close up watch until it settled then tried a larger piece to make even bigger coloured eruptions.

The second experiment was vinegar explosions using coloured vinegar in bottles and bicarb soda. The blue worked so well that it did actually splash Dimples in the face. Lucky he had his scientist safety glasses on. The trick to making a good explosion is to be prepared with everything you need on hand, plus extra. Make sure you put enough vinegar in the bottle so that it is about 2/3 full with enough room for it to fizz/build up and spout out the top.  Use a bottle with a small hole, narrow neck and use a wide funnel so that you can get a shot of bicarb soda into the container in one hit.

Dimples had go after go, of course the very first time worked the best with a huge explosion erupting so quickly it exploded out the top of the funnel before he had a chance to move it. Then he tried the blue witha  huge grin and a very loud "Woah" as he shook his vinegar covered hands but each one still continued to fizz over for several tries and the colours that splashed out onto the tray started mixing and looking very cool indeed. Dimples noticed the colours that were mixing and swirled his fingers around in them.

Do you have a Small Scientist waiting to perform some experiments like these?  

I'd love to hear how it goes, leave me a comment below

Learning Concepts:
Science; Oil/Water & Vinegar/Bicarb
Colour recognition
Mixing Prime Colours
Role Playing & Pretend Play
Sensory
Hands on

Ideas to Extend with:
Volcanic Explosions
Colour Mixing on Ice crystals
Do it in the dark; Glowing Vinegar Science
Mixing Prime Colours in bags

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Exploring patterns & details in seashells

 

One of the major advantages of living in Australia on the coast is getting to explore beaches, rock pools and endless amounts of beautiful shells and we are lucky, there are a few serene, mostly deserted beaches nearby that we visit regularly. 

Usually we hunt for treasure, look for crabs and creatures in rock pools, build sand structures, draw in the sand, jump waves and search for unusual shells. There is one beach we visit driving there by 4x4 and we usually have the entire beach to our self, it never fails to provide pile after pile of shells. Amongst them are these pretty little shells with the most intricate patterns that I used to collect with my mum as a kid.

Dimples has taken on the family tradition, he loves collecting shells. On this occasion we collected our treasures and specifically seeked out these small little shells. Bankivia Fasciata, a mollusk known as silver kelp shell but they don't actually live on kelp they live in sand just out of the break water. So after rough seas lots get washed up. Pinks, purples, greys, browns, whites, & cream colours with stripes or zig zag patterns (or both).

Once home we sorted our finds into piles; rocks, our silver kelp shells, shells with holes to thread, shells for the hermit crab pet & shells for the garden. Dimples started noticing the patterns and asking if they were a crab or slug (mollusk) & if they were the same even though they were all different. He noticed the zig zags and stripes so we decided to pick some favourites and look at them under a microscope. I drew up some outlines and dimples chose his shells and identified the colours and the shades on them, then focused on the detailed patterns. 

 

It was complicated; drawing tight zig zags and differentiating between shades of the colours and then identifying the way in which the patterns flowed on the shell. Using a steady hand and trying to stay in side the lines he did the patterning.

 

After he spent a long time focusing on the details of the shells and talking about how they are different, he announced he was finished and got a bit of clear tape to stick the shell he drew next to his picture of it. He was very pleased with his creations and told me that one is for me, one for Nan & one for his great Aunt who he went shell collecting with while she was visiting recently.

Learning Concepts:
Identifying colors & shades
Sorting
Exploring Nature
Learning about shells
Steady pencil grip
Focused attention to detail
identifying differences and similarities

Ideas for Extension:
Draw the patterns in white crayon & then use water color to paint the sea shell
Collect shells for a pretend play beach
Exploring different sizes and shapes of shells found
Use them with some sand dough in a Sand Dough Activity like this
Use them in some Play dough Texture Printing

Happy Adventures :)

Rainbow Ice-Crystal Science

 

This awesome Ice colour mixing Experiment started as our usual sensory bin and developed into something I hadnt planned or imagined, a much more magical episode of play and learning.

I love it when Play manifests into new discoveries and something completely unexpected.

 

It all started outside as I was cleaning out the deep freezer!  Instead of wasting the ice slabs I was chipping them off and giving them to Dimples to play with.

Dimples adores penguins so he was happy to play away in an imaginary small world where a Killer whale was chasing penguins onto ice capsules and lion seals were dancing around in the snow. Once all the ice was in the tub I gave him some coloured water to muck around with seen as though it was a warm day, blue & green that represented the ocean then I let him be.

 

Just quickly a word of advice, if you are doing this with younger children be careful as the ice can stick to their skin, I explained this to Dimples first and had some water in the bottom of the tub in case it happened but he thought it was the funniest thing ever and wanted to stick his fingers to the new pieces of ice.

 

To our surprise the coloured water looked amazing on the ice capsules. Because freezer ice is crystallised over time, the colour really soaked up into it much better then on any other ice that we have played with. The capsules kept their crystallised form, with small icicles and didn't melt too quickly, instead they took on the colours and looked like crystals themselves.

Dimples thought this was the coolest thing ever and used up all the green and blue then asked for more. 
Extending on the magical look of the coloured ice crystals we got a few different colours to experiment with and a dropper to use.
Dimples tried out yellow and then got the red, by then most of the ice crystals had blue on them but remained nice and vibrant in colour.  Instead of running through or dripping out the colour stayed nice and bright.

As he squirted red over a blue ice capsule he excitedly yelled "look Mummy Purple!" and I was amazed just how well the colour mixed through the ice. "Wow what other colours can you make?" I encouraged and he made a bright Orange. With every new colour he mixed he would say "WOW, look!" it was great to see him so engaged in the theory of colour mixing.
He experimented with mixing colours and got some beautiful shades of orange and purple amongst the red, green and blue.  By the end it looked like a rainbow of ice crystals.

After all the colour mixing and mucking around Dimples just continued to play with the Rainbow ice trying to break it up and smash it around.
Then after breaking a large slab in two he showed me that the colour had gone all the way through. Instead of the colours running off or only staying on the surface, as they do with your usual ice/salt play they had actually soaked into the entire slab and mixed in the process.

The large purple Ice crystal reminded me off a crystallised amethyst stone that my Nan gave me as a girl. We thought it was quite a magical and beautiful way to have some sensory play and experiment with colour mixing and ice crystals.

Happy Adventures

Mixing prime colours

Colour Exploration Stage 2: Mixing Prime Colours.

Dimples has known his colours for a while now, his lights and darks and all the colours in between!
I guess the next thing is to learn how colours mix together.

This is a Clean and Easy Lesson in Colour mixing for children of all ages. All you need are your Prime colour in food colouring, shaving foam or hair Mouse and some seal locked sandwich bags.

    RED                              YELLOW                                BLUE  

I stuck a small Coloured sticker on the plastic bags to help the learning process so that after the mixing was complete Dimples could see which bags started with what colours. 


What you will need

We did our Secondary Colours; Red/Yellow,  Yellow/Blue,  Blue/Red & I did an unmarked one so that Dimples could mix his own colour, knowing that he would choose all 3 prime colours.

First squirt your shaving cream in down the centre, leave small gaps on either side so your colours can get right in.  Do not over fill it, you want to be able to seal shut your bag easily without getting shaving cream into the sealing lock grooves. If this happens you could end up with an explosion of food colour and shaving cream all over your child's face, then it will be neither a clean nor an easy lesson in colour mixing.



Dimples makes green as the Red and Blue bag waits.

That's it! Seal it closed and one by one let your child mix the colours together. It was a success, Dimples was so enthusiastic as he mixed and mushed the bag around saying "I can see a bit of ..... Green! It made green mama"



Our mixed colours, showing what Prime colour was added to begin with.

 

Not only did Dimples watch and learn colour theory but he got a work out mixing the shaving cream. This is a great activity to strengthen the muscles needed for writing with all the pushing, scrunching, grabbing, pinching, squeezing and moulding. The shaving cream in the bag feels great as well, like a fluffy pillow.


The experimental mixing bag turned out into a light baby poo brown. I didn't get a photo but mid way through mixing it looks delicious! Not kidding, it looked like a rainbow paddle pop . So from a rainbow paddle pop to baby poo brown Dimples learnt that some colours mix well and some not so well.





The rainbow paddlepop colour with all 3 colours.

That turned baby pop brown!?

It was an interesting experiment and he loved it. We had a great discussion about colour, how there is only 3 prime colours and we went through the house pointing out colours as Dimples thought about what colours would be used to make it.

Happy Adventures

Ice & Salt Reactions - Halloween Theme

Spiders in Ice castles and a Salt Melting Experiment

 

Another Halloween themed play treat. This time Dimples had a play date with his good friend Miss K. I had prepared some Ice castles (using sand castle molds) with some spooky plastic spiders and flies frozen inside.  I set out the Ice castles, some salt to help melt the formations and some coloured water with a dropper each.

 

Dimples and Miss K went to work sprinkling salt over their Ice and trying to master the squirt droppers.  Its not working, they both exclaimed slowly adding more and more salt, but it was. The salt reacts with the ice and as the ice melts it speeds up the process, so as the salty water runs down the castle is causes cavities, rifts and small trails for the coloured water to flow through. 

 

It is a slow process but it looks really cool when the colours start running down the crevices. I think these two 3.5 year olds were just a little impatient and wanted to get to the spiders straight away. They stuck with it, adding different colours on top and watching it flow down the sides. Dimples the extremist tried to speed things up by dumping handfuls of salt on top.

 

It looked vibrant and some what spooky but it wasnt what he had in mind, so he tipped amore and more colour over the top.  Slowly he seen it start to melt down the sides and he seen some spider legs poke through.  Miss K successfully removed a fly and decided to taste the ice. Hmmmm yukky she said to the salt covered ice.

 

The two friends mastered how to use the droppers and the syringe squirts by observing me and each other, Miss K found it easier to do it one handed pushing with her thumb and Dimples mastered the skill using two hands to fill the entire tube then squirting it with his pointer finger. Both got the hang of it though. This intruquit technique helps develop the muscles in the hand needed for writting skills and develops hand/eye co-ordination.

They also got a lesson on colour mixing; as our yellow and red colours mixed together we got a nice bright Halloween Orange, and the yellow and blue = Green. The friends noticed that all of the colours pooled at the bottom of the tray into a black colour.

 

Happy Adventures :-)

Halloween Discovery Bottle

This is an easy fun DIY activity in preparation of Halloween. To get in the spirit we put this discovery bottle together in just 10 minutes and Dimples enjoyed exploring it all afternoon.

Using an empty Pom juice bottle we added-

• Glucose syrup
• Halloween Sequins
• Eye Ball buttons
• Orange Glitter
• Black and red buttons
• Small plastic spiders
• Star sequins

We played I SPY, and named things starting by letter such as Spider, Star, Bat, button, Pumpkin, Eye, Orange, Black, White, Red, Slime & Glitter.  Dimples enjoyed helping make this one because of its funky shape and the messy time we had getting the glucose syrup in. These are so easy and simple, the best thing is though, anyone can make them out of recycleable materials and things you find laying around in your art/craft supplies, or even every day materials. Just remember to glue the lid shut!

6 months - 18 months:
Discovery bottles are great for developing observation skills, predictability and thinking skills.  For young children they are great for gross motor, grasping, passing from hand to hand, twisting, turning, shaking, they aide in the development of focused concentration. High contrast colours should be used for younger children to develop their sight perception, depth and visual focus. They are great for sight and sound sensory development and when used with more than one child can help in sharing, interacting and swapping.

 

18 Months- 4 years:
With older children they can be more detailed and used as  I Spy bottles to introduce letters, numbers,  themes and some science lessons such as separation, depth, gravity, density, sinking and floating. Again it helps with predictability, cause and effect cognition's, observation skills, focused attention and thinking skills.

They can be used for experiments such as sink or float, separation using water and oil, gravity with non liquid ones or like you seen here the Halloween one explore concepts of density and depth. Themes can be taught also, like the use of this Halloween theme. With non contrast similar colours and softer colours older children need to pay attention to objects presence.
If you want to make it more interesting for younger children, enrol their skills and help. Get them to choose what they want to add in to the bottle, how many and get them to help measure and pour anything in via a large funnel as I did with Dimples. This one is his favourite because he made it.

Happy Adventures :)

Discover the Seasons ~ I Spy Bottles

We haven't done discovery bottles for a while so this was an easy in door activity that we did on a very windy day.  Previous discovery bottles have been made when dimples was younger for him simply to explore and shake around, so this time we did a little more of a grown up activity 'I spy Bottles'.

 

Dimples said 'why is it winter?' this morning, because the weather doesnt know what it is doing, although it is spring it does feel like winter of a morning.
We went around collecting bits and pieces that represents the seasons and discussed what happens over the course of a year as the weather changes, and why it may still feel like winter but it is actually now spring. We then went on a quick flower hunt and noticed all the new blooms and all the nice smells that Spring brings.



 

 

 

Winter: Some white dusty corn flour, snow flake sequins, thinly cut cellophane, some pearl beads, blue glitter and some pearl blue shaped bunny heads. Symbolising cold, snowy weather during winter. The picture does no justice as you cant see the pretty snow sequins, it does look just like snow with snow flakes.

 

 

Spring: we gathered some lavender, added some bright pretty coloured Pom poms, a fake daisy flower, purple, yellow and aqua coloured rice, a knitted daisy flower, some pink glitter and some green plastic petals.

 

Summer: To us Summer means the beach, so this was easy. Sand from the sand pit, some shells, a plastic sea star, and some blue sparkling jewels.

 

Autumn: In our Autumn Discovery bottle we had some gum nuts and fallen leaves in shades of yellow and red, dimples added some golden decorative stones in it and painted a few leaves in yellow and orange.

 

For older children these discovery bottles are great for I spy games. For younger children and babies they are great for shaking, twisting, switching hands and inspecting.

We did lots of I spy games: I spy games based on what is in it, for example I spy with my little eye, something beginning with S- Sand, sea shell, sea star, Summer. We did some based on colours that were in it and some based on the objects in it and we lined them all up in order. Dimples still enjoyed knocking them around and shaking them as musical maracas.

Happy Adventures

Halloween pumpkin play dough

 

It may be a little early but I've always been a fan of Halloween and get right in to the spirit of the decoration, dress up and trick or treating. Last year we had a Halloween theme play date and I'll do the same this year for dimples and his friends but for now it's all about psyching him up and building the excitement up with some Halloween craft and play.

First up, some orange play dough, some twigs with leaves on them and a black texter. Easy right. We had fun making these cute jack o lantern heads out of our play dough and they looked so cute.

Starting with some rolling dimples made balls, circular motions on the table and in his hands. Perfect!
Then using a stick he imprinted the sections through the pumpkins.

I made one first as he played and he imitated me straight away making the cutest pumpkin by him self.
Dimples was very pleased as he added in the pumpkin stems, asking me how they grow which started a great discussion. We then talked about the spooky jack I lantern face as I drew one on, then it was his turn.
They turned out so cool that we had to roll it all together and make one huge pumpkin head!

Rainbow Gelatin Exploration

Jello, jelly, gelatin its all the same to me.
Its a cool sensory material that never gets boring.
Have you ever used it in play?

 

 

This was our first attempt of gelatin using the jar of powered gelatin and the colours of the Rainbow.
I can announce that we will definitely be trying it again, in bigger better ways....

 
Just the way it jiggles, shakes and wiggles, the smooth texture and the sense of the cool temperature on the tips of your fingers is enough for any child to want to play with it (and adult).

 

I prepared some colourful sheets of jelly using gelatin, all it needs is to be heated (not boiled) and dissolved in water and then add some food colouring and let it set in the fridge. I just poured a cup of individual colours on cooking paper in a tray the night before, not knowing whether it would work or not. Success! I'll have to get more of this stuff, that was so simple.



Dimples and his best buddy explored the wriggly texture of the jelly with their fingers pretending to mix and cook with it. They used measuring cups to "measure" it and some plastic knives and forks to slice it in to pieces.
























Funnily enough, they held the bigger thicker pieces up to the light shaking and wobbling them, laughing at the funny movements it made. They experimented with tearing it up, squishing it between their fingers, chopping it with the knife and squashing it into a bowl pretending to make each other dinner. Mmmmmm Yum flavourless gelatin for dinner.



The gelatin is very fun used this way, its thicker and more pliable than your usual eating jelly, it is more like rubber and handles more from the playful preschooler than any jello would. It doesnt turned liquidy either, it stays in clumps and lasts much longer.
The boys tried mixing it and blending it together but the only success in that was making smaller pieces and more of a mess. They had a ball splatting it about and mucking around with it.



After the rainbow fiesta of wiggly wobbly fun, they piled it all back on to the tray and helped me clean it up like little angels......
That was until we arrived at the park later in the day and they were giggling and pointing at me, to their amusement I found the tiny rainbow chunks of jello they had put in my hair while i was down under the table and chairs trying to clean up.
Little Angels :)