Before we dive into this I would like to talk about sensory projects a little bit and what they do for children.

Sensory play encourages children to manipulate and mould materials, building up their fine motor skills and coordination.

Sensory play uses all 5 senses, but the sense of touch is often the most frequent. Toddlers and children process information through their senses. They learn through exploring these.

Sensory play is unstructured, open-ended, not product-oriented; it is the purest sense of exploratory learning

Self-esteem: sensory play offers kids the opportunity for self-expression because there is no right answer and children feel safe to change or experiment with what they are doing.

Language development- experimenting with language and descriptive words.

Develop social skills: practicing negotiation skills, turn taking and sharing. Provides opportunities for working out problems and experimenting with solutions.

Encourages Imagination and creative play.

 This post is going to be a shining example of why I say it’s a beautiful mess.  I told the kids on Friday that we would do a water sensory activity on Monday. I was hoping to find some tapioca pearls to make edible water beads.  Of course this got lost in the 5 million things I had going on this weekend and I found myself at Walmart standing in the pudding aisle Sunday night realizing that there was only one option and it wasn’t tapioca pearls. knowing nothing about tapioca I picked up the  only box Walmart had. 

It looks a lot like sea salt. 

 So now I’m standing in my kitchen with this substance and decided well, I guess I’ll just put it in some water ! Hey why not!

  After a couple minutes of sitting it forms this gooey beady dough!

On Monday when I did this activity with the kids we used a muffin tin to separate the colors.

We used gel food coloring. The brand is Betty Crocker and I would not recommend using it as it doesn’t mix in water well and bled.  I have used other gel food coloring for products that don’t bleed. This is what I usually use Wilton 601-5580 1/2-Ounce Certified-Kosher Icing Colors, Set of 12

 Then I let D Poor in the tapioca until each color was full.

 This is what it looked like prior to molding and playing with it.

 This is just a picture to show you that you can kind of mold it and make 3-D things with it. D, C, and Caliger had a blast! D is nearly 5 he took a bite and then proceeded to tell me that it was not good at all! Haha! For E I left it without food coloring as she is eight months old and puts everything in her mouth! So this was a total accident but we will definitely be making this again!