Smarties love sensory play, loves art and craft. Me, the mommy, loves to satisfy their craving for play and art using easily available items found at home. Yes, I’m a budget mommy and being on a budget doesn’t mean you can’t have fun at home.
Daddy has recently stopped using shaving cream and seeing that it’s a waste to just dump it away, we took it and create an artwork out of it. Smarties were excited and started gathering all the required materials and started working on it.
What you just need is:
– shaving cream (or whipped cream, we used shaving cream over here)
– food colourings (or poster colour, we used food colouring over here)
– plain paper or cardboard to put your shaving cream
– plain paper to create artwork
– dropper (to “drop” different colours on the shaving cream)
– toothpicks (optional)
Here’s what it looked like for our activity of the day…
Smarties started spraying the shaving cream onto the big piece of blank paper. Next, they started dropping different colours on the shaving cream. Once that was done, they started mixing and swirling the shaving cream and here’s how it looked like. We used the dropper to swirl the food colourings around a bit. You may use a toothpick to do it as well. It will look marbled depending on how much “marble” it. Up to the child’s preferences, that is. Isn’t it pretty?
Oh…smarties said that the Teachers’ Day is coming and hence made some bookmarks for their teachers using these “marbled painting”. Creativity juice started flowing when the kids started to play freely with no restrictions given. As for me, I stepped in only when they needed help in laminating the bookmarks.
What do we do with the leftover  shaving cream? Sensory play, of course! We don’t waste the cream for anything. Smarties had fun mixing up the shaving cream with their bare hands and later on taking out their kitchen utensils pretending the shaving cream as their ingredients and dishes. On the other hand, mommy had a great time catching up with her housework. Isn’t that perfect?
This can be pretty messy, so do bare in mind that the kids are ready for the clean up after that. Yes, the kids. Mommy can step in to help, though. Getting the kids to clean up provides a good chance to get them take responsibility by holding them accountable for what they did, let them see themselves as important contributors to the family and getting connected to the family. We had fun even when cleaning up the mess!
Here’s a little short step by step video guide on how we create the marbled painting. We hope you enjoy the video. Till then, stay tuned for our next art and craft idea! 🙂
My 1 and 3 year olds love sensory play too. But I’m always so afraid of the mess later that we do not do it as often as we should. How did you overcome that when they kids were younger?
Vivien ( Beautiful Chaos )
Understand…For me, first I have to be ok with the mess. Secondly, let them play within a certain compound/area but at least the area is big enough for them to enjoy. For the 3 years old, can start to train them to help cleaning up after the mess. That’s what i did, although not totally clean but a little help is better than none. Now that they are older, they have the habit of helping and cleaning up their own mess too 😉
Would those food colouring cling to the fingers? How do you remove them? I recently did a school project with my girl using food colouring – Oh man! I still have some blue and red on my nails and fingers after 3 days!
Yes, it does but not very long, though. I guess is because the shaving cream because it is oily so the colours don’t really get stuck on the hands. We usually get it washed off easily. At most, it stays for a day or 2 not 3 though.
It looks so fun! But yes.. same question! Won’t their fingers be stained for many days?
It didn’t stay long because I guess the oil from the cream prevented the colours from staying put on our hands 🙂
This is so interesting and intriguing! Gonna try this one day. Thanks for sharing!
Welcome 🙂
Oooh, we did something similar using tempera paints instead of food colouring – washes off little hands very well!
Oh yes…tempera paint is an alternative choice. My home ran out of it so I use food colouring instead. Parents worried about colour staining their hands can use tempera paints 😉
Thanks Debs G!
We tried something similar sometime back but difficult to get rid of these food colours.
Maybe can try tempera paint 😉
My daughter loves to do arty stuff like this. Your adventure looks cool. Will share it with my girl.
Great!! 🙂
Great sensory activity but the gotta think twice as I imagine the mess aft, esp for my lil’ messy boy..lolz! Thks for ur kind sharing 🙂
Hahaha…ya can be quite messy. Another way is let him play on the picnic mat… easier to clean up after that 🙂
Such an awesome idea.. and the effects came out very well too!
Ai @ Sakura Haruka
Thank you! 🙂
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