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.
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!
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