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Messy play ideas

15 replies

QuestionableMouse · 10/08/2023 20:56

Littlest nephew is desperate to do some messy play. So far I have

Bicarb volcanoes
Oobleck
Finger Painting/potato prints
Shaving foam + food colouring
Orbeez
Paper clay

What else can we do? He's five but he's quite young for his age. Doing it in the garden so no worries about mess in the house.

OP posts:
Stickmansmum · 10/08/2023 20:59

Car wash. All his toy vehicles. Tub with water and bubbles. Paint brushes to wash with. Towel under it all. It’s clean messy play!

10speckledfrogs · 10/08/2023 21:04

Mud pies - old baking equipment, some trays, soil / compost and water, kids love it and get super mucky

potions - water, some bottles, flowers, leaves, food colouring, compostable glitter and anything else you can think of - lots of fun mixing it together and pretending it turns you into a frog or something daft, obviously don't drink it

Good old fashioned normal baking - bread is a good one because they get in there with their hands to knead the dough

Sand - self explanatory, good to have some treasures to bury too

dinoice · 10/08/2023 21:08

Pour a little milk onto a tray. Pop on some dots of food colouring. Then they get cotton buds, dip in fairy liquid and make lovely colour jump patterns.

textrues. So crushed leaves, wet spaghetti or coloured spaghetti, different things to paint with, cars, sponges, paint feet and run on paper. porridge oats. Anything that feels different.

lots of bubbles and soapy things. Foam soap is great.

slime. Mine love slime. Lots of easy recipes online.

Guiltyfeethavegotnorhythm0 · 10/08/2023 21:14

Stickmansmum · 10/08/2023 20:59

Car wash. All his toy vehicles. Tub with water and bubbles. Paint brushes to wash with. Towel under it all. It’s clean messy play!

I remember getting my son to do this decades ago when I needed half an hours break . Line up his car his bike his electric car , cleaned 'em all 😂

QuestionableMouse · 10/08/2023 21:14

Love these, thank you!

We do car wash occasionally and he always has fun 😁

OP posts:
SliceOfCakeCupOfTea · 10/08/2023 21:16

I was gonna say cooked spaghetti with food colouring/pain and drag it across paper. We did the same with meatballs in paint and rolled them across paper..

dinoice · 10/08/2023 21:16

pressed to soon. Ice also great. Slush. Or things frozen in ice. Toys etc.

Merryoldgoat · 10/08/2023 21:18

My boys liked lentils.

JennyForeigner · 10/08/2023 21:26

These are amazing ideas. I'm ashamed to have nothing to contribute except that we love dragging the tracks of toy cars through paint and then letting them brrrmmm over paper.

Maybe one to combine with the carwash! Oh, and 'fossils' trapped in the ice. Hours of chip chip chipping with the tools from one of those little fossil hunting kits.

JennyForeigner · 10/08/2023 21:30

Totally doing milk/food colouring tomorrow though. A tenner on tiny bottles of every concievable food colouring was a solid parenting spend.

Cornflour sludge 'sea' around various island habitats was fun. Cardboard box, various stones and stuff from the garden, jobs a good 'un. Even better with a volcano in it which explodes whenever we have visitors.

Yellowlegobrick · 10/08/2023 21:35

At 5 a lot of what is posted here is a bit basic & more suited to toddlers. This is a school aged child, its a good age to teach him that he can direct his interests to real outputs, develop skills, actually produce useful things and not waste resources (i can't stand people letting children waste loads of food playing with it).

What about:

  • papier mache modelling
  • baking properly - rolling ou, cutting and decorating cookies with icing & sprinkles
  • ordinary painting but on a large scale, get an ikea paper role and put out a 2 metre length in the garden and get him to paint a huge picture
  • making soup - set him peeling & chopping loads of veg, weighing out beans and lentils, shelling peas, measuring water or milk to add, get him to write his own recipe
  • gardening, can he dig over and weed anything, plant some seeds, water everything with the hose, learn about making compost?
  • you can buy cardboard play houses & rockets to decorate yourself
  • clay pottery - teach him how to make a coil cup that he can use to drink from
  • chalks on the driveway
  • actual wash your car, properly, and wax it. DD is rising 4 and loves to wax my car. If she could reach the food she could charge a decent price for a valet
lanthanum · 10/08/2023 22:03

Coloured ice / ice with things inside - takes a bit of prep.
You can get stripey ice by gradually adding layers with different coloured food colouring. It's a good idea to cool down each layer by putting it in the freezer for a short while before adding it, so that the warmer water doesn't crack the previous one. I also used to have a clear layer between coloured layers so the colours didn't leak into each other.
You can freeze small toys into the ice - again, in stages - first just water, then water plus the toy, then more water on the top.

Sand mousse
Mix play sand with water with lots of washing-up liquid in, and use a hand-help blender to whisk it. The texture is very different.

Large cardboard box big enough to sit in and paint.

Old sheet, tray of paint, make footprints across it.

Make a swamp for toy dinosaurs - soil and greenery in a large tray.

(I had a couple of Lakeland's "oven rack soaking trays" which were great for this sort of activity. They were also very good for clearing lego into later on, especially when models needed to put out of reach of younger visitors.)

Some people have qualms about activities using foodstuffs - but if you don't, or have some out-of-date stuff, then go for it. Jelly, spaghetti (add washing-up liquid to make it slimy), porridge, with added food colouring.

(Actually, as with bread, making jelly on its own is quite fun, and you can add fruit too.)

Washing-up liquid bottle with flour/salt/water mix as for playdough but not cooked. Squirt onto cardboard - when it dries it's sparkly. As ever, multiple bottles with different food colourings is even better.

Papier mache but that has to be spread over a few visits to give the layers a chance to dry.

Bubbles - I remember that one bottle of gelatin in a 2l bottle or washing-up-liquid/water worked well for good strong bubbles, but I can't remember how much wasing-up liquid went in. You can do big bubbles by taking two sticks and fastening a loop of string to the ends. Put the bubble mixture in a food storage box, dip the string in.

QuestionableMouse · 11/08/2023 23:18

Yellowlegobrick · 10/08/2023 21:35

At 5 a lot of what is posted here is a bit basic & more suited to toddlers. This is a school aged child, its a good age to teach him that he can direct his interests to real outputs, develop skills, actually produce useful things and not waste resources (i can't stand people letting children waste loads of food playing with it).

What about:

  • papier mache modelling
  • baking properly - rolling ou, cutting and decorating cookies with icing & sprinkles
  • ordinary painting but on a large scale, get an ikea paper role and put out a 2 metre length in the garden and get him to paint a huge picture
  • making soup - set him peeling & chopping loads of veg, weighing out beans and lentils, shelling peas, measuring water or milk to add, get him to write his own recipe
  • gardening, can he dig over and weed anything, plant some seeds, water everything with the hose, learn about making compost?
  • you can buy cardboard play houses & rockets to decorate yourself
  • clay pottery - teach him how to make a coil cup that he can use to drink from
  • chalks on the driveway
  • actual wash your car, properly, and wax it. DD is rising 4 and loves to wax my car. If she could reach the food she could charge a decent price for a valet

We bake and cook every week so it's not special ifyswim. Thanks for the ideas though! 😁

OP posts:
veryberrypericherry · 12/08/2023 08:50

Soak Chia seeds in coloured water overnight in the fridge. It makes a nice slimy frogspawn like stuff. Great in a tuff spot with toys like bugs or dinosaurs.

Rainbow rice is lovely for pouring, transporting and generally playing with. Just mix rice with food colouring in a bag or birr we o and fry in the sun.

Foam - shaving foam with a few drops of food colouring can be used as paint or just a lovely messy play medium
You can also buy coloured bath play foam from home bargains.

Use a whisk with water and washing up liquid to make a lovely frothed foam, which can also be coloured.

Potions - look in your spice rack for our of date spices and old cooking ingredients. Present with jars, funnels, spoons and coloured water and get to making fun potions!

Girasoli · 12/08/2023 08:54

Not messy play as such but do you have any small gardening jobs that need doing? My 3 and 7 year old will happily move soil and rocks from one bit of the garden to the other for ages with grandad and those tiny kids shovels.

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