Messy Play Day

On the first weekend of the school holidays, we had a messy play day with a few friends from school. If we were in Busselton, we would probably have had another mud day. Given there is no mud where we are now, we decided to make some mess in other ways.

We made our playdough the day before. We made strawberry cake playdough, chocolate playdough and vanilla playdough. Throw in some ice cream cups, scoops and rainbow sprinkles (the rainbow rice we had made on a previous weekend) and you have everything you need for some messy and creative playdough fun - that smells lovely as well.

 I had planned a number of activities for the three hour play date. The day was due to start at 1pm, as I knew I would need time in the morning to set everything up.

 Paint filled balloons are ready to pop.

 Marbles are ready to be used in our painting.

 I had numerous containers all around the backyard, ready to hold and contain our mess (or so I thought).

Here are our ingredients for the day - flour, bi carb, yeast, hydrogen peroxide, shaving cream, food colouring, cornflour...

 The kids had such fun on our nature play day several years back with spray painting a sheet, that we decided to do it again. This year I tried watered down paint in the spray bottles, not food colouring , to see if it left less staining on our skin.

We filled the pool with water and soap so that the girls could use it to wash their hands whenever they needed to. 

 We started the day with carrot painting - which K had practised the weekend before.

 Some of the artwork produced by the girls.

 Marble painting was fun, and only a little bit messy to start off the day.

 The girls came back to the playdough during the day, whenever they wanted a break from the mess the other girls were getting into.

 Flour and baby oil makes cloud dough - which holds together and breaks apart similar to moon sand. I let the girls experiment and add as much flour and oil as they liked - creating a wetter mixture, then making adding more flour and so on.

 We did some experiments with bicarb and vinegar, and the one above is with yeast and hydrogen peroxide - called elephant's toothpaste if searching on the web. 

Although cloud dough is quite easy to clean up - the flour basically dries and returns to flour and can brush off, what I did not anticipate, is that the girls would want to mix everything we did - together into their original cloud dough bowls. Once you add the growing elephant's toothpaste to the cloud dough, a new messy creation is formed.

 The girls created a new goop which was sticky like chewing gum - and had fun stomping in it and squishing it between their toes - and then all over the lawn.

 Balloons were successfully popped - with some fun finger painting to follow.

 Cornflour and water makes a fun, sticky goo.

 Add shaving cream though, and the fun (and mess) level sky rockets.

Some of the girls had a great time sliding around in the slippery, gooey mess - ending up completely white from head to toe. Our hand washing pool became a sloppy body washing pool as the girls dived in to wash their whole bodies. I think at the end of the day, the pool was the messiest thing to clean up as it was filled with every ingredient we had used during the day.

 Spray painting was fun. The colours were not as vibrant as the time we tried this with food colouring.

 Water beads were jumped and squished on the trampoline.

 The lawn is still recovering, and it took Mum about a week to clean all the dishes and bits and pieces we used during the day. Messy Play Day though, was definitely messy and a lot of fun. I'm confident all the girls had a good time and I think they will remember that it is okay to be messy sometimes and that we can actually experiment and learn whilst having fun.