Sweet Factory Day!-Part 1:Messy Play with Water Beads

The last day of the Summer holidays, here already. The past six weeks have flown by and have definitely not gone as I'd imagined! 

I had planned to do lots of activities at home as my two love having 'chill days', and lots of blog posts about the activities. However, a four day kitchen conversion became a four week one, leaving us with only an upstairs bathroom sink and a microwave & kettle in the dining room as a kitchen for much of the holidays. This doesn't lend itself well to messy play set-ups! 

After that I was ill for a good chunk of a week, followed by lots of nights away visiting relatives so life hasn't left much scope for tuff tray fun! It's been a great Summer but mainly spent on fun days out, away from the plaster dust and boxes of kitchenware littering the house!

However, we did have a fun day at home the other week when the kids asked if they could play "sweet factories". My sister had given me the equipment from an Orbeez set that my niece had grown out of. The Orbeez beads had been used up but it works with any water beads. We had some water beads that had been well played with so I thought this was the perfect time to try out the set. I teamed the 'Magic Chef Set' up with some toy kitchen items and some ice cube trays.

The set had a machine that crushes up the water beads into mush to make pretend food with. It reminded me a lot of my Mr Frosty toy as a child - it does work but takes a lot of muscle and produces very little of the mush for your effort! 

However what DID work really well was the syringes. Ollie had such fun putting water beads into the syringes and squeezing the resulting mush into an ice cube tray. The more times he put it through the syringe, the smoother mush was produced, much to his delight. He took great care putting all the same colour bead in at a time to make different coloured cubes and giving each coloured 'sweet' a different name and flavour.

You could do this with any plastic syringe such as ones that come with children's medicine and there is something really satisfying about squishing those little beads! They are toxic free of course but you would still need to supervise younger children with this activity.

This was a great sensory activity as well as using fine motor skills and lots of descriptive communication. I love that we've found a new way to use our water beads once they've been well played with too! They spent the whole morning (and went back to it the next day) playing sweet factories with this before we made real sweeties in the afternoon...