Autumn Messy Play!

Since starting our Babies and Beyond sessions we have found them to be a massive hit, especially our messy play! So now we are showing you how you can recreate the messy play at home. You don't have to do them in the big cement mixing tubs like us, you could easily create the same effect in smaller containers (this could help reduce the mess you have to tidy up as well!). When designing the messy play I like to make sure everything is edible and can be bought from your local supermarket.

Due to having a background in psychology I have been reading up on my old developmental psychology textbooks to gain a deeper understanding of the sensory development of babies and toddlers. It is really interesting to learn about their abilities and how they change month by month - I will do a future blog about the sensory development so you can see what I mean! So when I am creating the messy play I try to make sure there are different smells, tastes, colours and textures for them to get stuck in with, I even try to incorporate sounds by using things that might crunch under their feet and bottoms. This really makes it a multi-sensory experience which is sure to enhance children's development at almost any age, even your older ones will still love getting messy.

This week we were celebrating Autumn, so here is a guide to our Autumn Messy Play!

The theme for this tub was an autumn walk, so we really wanted to recreate those crunchy leaves along with some fresh ones with a variety of smells.
To create our leafy walk, we used:

Cornflakes
Bran-Flakes

Baby Leaf Salad
Basil

Mint

Thyme

The babies absolutely loved munching on the cornflakes, bran-flakes, herbs and leaves. It gave them a chance to experience different textures and flavours along with the smells of the aromatic herbs. As soon as you got near the tub there was an infusion of basil and mint in the air. Although some of the children were a little bit unsure about standing and sitting in the cornflakes other adored being able to crunch and squash them and the sound underneath their feet. I would recommend this messy play tub for the babies to pre-school age however you could make this tub more interesting to older children by hiding small treasures in the cornflakes - maybe small squares of shiny paper which are jewels, or even collect some conkers and acorns to find. This could even be turned into a motor skill activity by trying to separate the bran-flakes from the cornflakes. Use your imagination to really bring it to life.

For the second tub I wanted to create a muddy experience, as we all know how rainy it gets in autumn! This one creates a lovely chocolate-y smell and the babies seem to love eating it! To make our edible mud, we used:

Cocoa Powder

Plain Flour

Vegetable Oil (Sunflower will work fine!)

Oats

Cornflour

Water

This one takes a little bit more work than the last, however it is worth it! First you need to mix the flour and cocoa powder. Once mixed together we need to mix in the oil. Do this a bit at a time and it is best to mix it with your hands, so maybe even get your little ones involved here as this is where the messy fun begins! You will roughly be using 1 cup of oil to 5 cups of flour, however just keep mixing slowly until you get a mixture that has the same consistency as kinetic sand, i.e. it will stay in a shape you squash it into but isn't too sticky. You may need to rub it together to evenly distribute the oil. Now you have your chocolate kinetic sand mixture you need to add the oats! Mix them all in to add to the texture. As the kinetic sand is quite dry, we wanted to add a gloopy mud element and for this we used cornflour and water! We mixed it in the middle of the chocolate sand mixture so some of the chocolate would mix in and add to the colour. Slowly add the water to the cornflour and you will find it gets quite tough to mix, slowly add more water until you get a mixture that moves like a liquid when left alone but acts like a solid when handled. There you have it, our edible mud! Again you can make this more advanced for your older children by adding thing like gummy worms for them to find in the mud. The cornflour and water is also a great science based activity for them to make and play with, it makes a great opportunity to teach them about non-Newtonian liquids (Liquids that act differently than normal liquids).

At messy play we don't just do our edible messy play tubs, we also do a painting activity! The paints we use are non-toxic. Although we don't advise eating the paint, the little ones are safe if they do!  You can get the paint we use below:

For our autumn paint activity we decided to make leaf prints, this is great to do because it requires you to go for a bit of a walk or a play in the garden to collect leaves. Once you have collected them you can dip them in and see all the veins and the skeleton of the leaf as you print it onto the paper.

We also love our hand prints when doing our painting activity, and this week was no different! So this week we made autumn leaf hand prints. We used red, orange and yellow paint to dip our hands into to make our hand print and then added the stem with the black paint. This is great fun for children of all ages!

And there you have it! 

Our messy play from this weeks Babies and Beyond. However, we don't just do messy play we also do Sensory Stories and Music Monkeys which is a great way to stimulate your little one through the use of story and nursery rhymes. We run Babies and Beyond most Monday's from 10.00am until 4.00pm at £3 per child! Yep, £3 to stay all day!! How amazing is that. If you are still a little unsure as to what Babies and Beyond is all about, check out our video below. The footage is all from this weeks session. 

We hope to see you there some time soon!