Toddler Week 58

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It’s Messy Time

Does your child know it is okay and fun to get messy? Do you know it is great for your child’s development if she gets messy?  Incorporating opportunities for “messy play” will benefit your child in different ways. By getting messy with her hands fine motor muscles are strengthening while her creative mind is expanding. Playing is the way that she learns and this is just another way to expand the play environment you provide for her.

When teaching how to play with the messy activity there are a few things you can do to enhance the experience:

  • Discuss the texture, the temperature, color, solidarity and other descriptive adjectives of the messy mixture.
  • While playing, tell her how to play with it, where to play with it in the house, and what to wear while playing with it.                                                                                                                                                             

There are many different messy activities to do that are fun at home.

  • Use a paint brush with water color
  • Finger painting is a proven way of exposing your child to texture and different sensations
  • Make your own paint at home with corn syrup and different colors of kool aid or food dye and pour in an ice cube tray.
  • Create a fun mixture by combining cornstarch and water until you have a consistency that turns into a solid when playing in your hand and a liquid when there is no pressure against the mixture, this is called Oobleck.
  • Place flour or dry rice on a tray for the little fingers to draw pictures. Make pudding, let it set and then give her paper and the pudding and instruct her to finger paint with the pudding.
  • While cooking, allow them to play with potato or carrot peelings in a bowl by your feet while you finish preparing their meal.                                                                                                                                              

Once the activity is over, remember to work together and reinforce those tidy up skills! Give your child the opportunity to clean her own hands first by giving her a wet towel.  Once you are both clean, each of you take rags and clean the seat, floor and where ever the mess landed.Talk to her the importance of cleaning up our mess, even if a mess was made by accident.  Now that the area is clean, its time to have more fun and make a mess again!!

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