Kids Co-op link up (#14 for me)

 
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Its time for Kids Co-op. Link up your kids focused posts and have a look at what the other talented parents, teachers and care givers have been up to this week. Here is what I am linking up:

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Sunshine bin

(Goblin is 32 months)

A while ago Happy Hooligans inspired me to have my first try at making cloud dough. It was a big success. Goblin loved playing with it, scooping it with his diggers and stacking it in his dumper trucks. But cloud dough is usually white. You can't successfully dye it with food colouring because most food colouring is water based and doesn't mix easily with the oil and flour. So I hit the interwebs and soon discovered a blog that could help me out: Familylicious came to the rescue with the idea of mixing in powder paint. 

The basic recipe for cloud dough is to mix flour and oil at a ratio of 8 to 1. And all I did was replace 2 of the 8 cups of flour with powder paint (one for each colour). Powder paint is quite expensive and from this experience I have learnt that you probably don't need 2 entire cups to 6 cups of flour. So I would probably recommend 

• 1 cups of oil
• 7 cups of flour
• 1 cups of powder paint (or ground chalk)

Most people use baby oil for cloud dough but seeing as we never have any in the house (because I have never found a slippery baby to be a good idea), we just use vegetable cooking oil.

I made neon yellow and and neon orange cloud dough and put them at either end of a big plastic tub. In the middle I filled a bowl with rose heads. I had emailed Hublet earlier in the week moaning that I was feeling miserable (it turned out to be the start of a summer cold and nothing more serious) and when I got home that day he had bought me a beautiful bunch of yellow roses (Big badge for awesome husband). But by the end of the week that heads were starting to droop in the heat so I cut them off and used them in Goblin's tray. They smelt amazing.

Over the top of the tray I hung a big golden spiral made from gold cardboard. This was really just to make it look more interesting but Goblin really liked it and started trying to drop the flower heads through the spiral. Later he took the cane out of the lump of playdough that was holding it up and ran round the room with the spiral. And finally he asked for some scissors and he chopped the spiral into tiny pieces and called it golden snow.

He also declared that he was making a cake and got me to help him scoop up the cloud dough into the big yellow bowl and mix it around. Then he went to our shelves, where I always leave some sensory play items, and he brought back a jar of silver beans from our moonscape and a huge tub of green tea and lavender from our butterfly play scape. He mixed these in with the rose petals and cloud dough. At this point the bean mix started to fly around the room and off the mat so I moved the container out into the garden.

 Goblin enlisted his tractor ad trailer as a method of transportation for his 'cake mix'. 

Goblin played with elements of this bin for a full 2 hours. Its the longest I have seen him play with a single activity ever. I therefore declare this sensory bin a roaring success. Now to try and salvage some of the mess.

Now to the linky!

I am sharing this at