No-Mess Color Mixing

~Holly

Take a paper plate and put three puddles of paint (preferably red, blue and yellow) on the plate about the size of a silver dollar. Position them like 3 point in a triangle. Next put plasticwrap over the plate and let them push the colors together by stroking the plastic wrap. Secondary colors will emerge like magic! This lets your child learn about color mixing without the mess

~from the book "Super baby food"

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Bubble Painting

~Holly

Mix equal parts of water and dishsoap. Pour into as many bowls as you want colors, in each bowl add paint. Have the kids put a straw in the bowl and make bubbles. Place a piece of paper over the bowl gently and let the bubbles pop on the paper. When it dries it works great for stationary, cards, wrapping paper, or just to hang on the frig!

We did this a few years ago at a birthday party for Emma.

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Play Dough

Holly (this is my altered form of the recipe from the book Super Baby Food)

2 + cups white flour
½ cup table salt (iodized or plain)
1 cup hot tap water
1 teaspoon cooking oil (optional-makes dough more pliable)
Dry Kool-aid packages - the amount depends on how many colors you want (I use the cheap off brand)

1. In a large bowl mix 2 cups flour and the salt
2. Slowly add the water and oil. This will be very doughy.
3. Place flour generously on your work surface, then place the dough in as many piles on the work surface as you want colors for (I usually do 2 colors for each batch). The more you do the brighter the colors will be, there will just be less dough of each color.
4. Make a whole in the center of each pile of dough and place the kool-aid in it, then kneed each pile separately like your making bread. You may need to add more flour until it gets to play dough consistency. The Kool-aid color may get on your hands while kneading, but it does not get on the kids hands at all when they are playing with the play dough.

Store in airtight containers (zip lock, old yogurt containers, etc.). The dough lasts for a long time. I forgot about some for about 3 months or so until we went to make more and found our last batch in with the play dough toy bag and it looked just as good as we left it, I was shocked. Although, it is really not an issue since it is so easy and cheap to make. It is much easier to take when the kids leave it out and it gets all dried up.

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