Just what you need – more mess! However, gooey, goopy crafts serve your toddler wonderfully. They help him develop eye-hand coordination and large and small motor skills. Learning through play is a great way to help your baby, toddler, or preschooler develop these skills.
Cornstarch and water is the simplest of goop. It’s also nontoxic, unless there are corn allergies in your family. Start with a bowl of cornstarch. Add water and mix slowly. The recipe is about 1 cup cornstarch to ½ a cup water. This makes a non-Newtonian fluid, which of course is something that you will tell your toddler about. It acts like a solid and a liquid all at once. But really, this is pretty cool goop. When you stir it hard, it resists the stirring and acts like a solid. When you hold it in your hand and let it sit there, it turns into the drippiest of liquids. Loads of fun!
How can you turn your goop into funny colors? If you don’t mind dyes, try Koolaid. While this might not be the healthiest of dyes, it is certainly nontoxic, and it’s cheap. It will turn your goop into wacky colors.
If you’d like to go all-natural, the best dye I’ve made is blue-purple. It’s a gorgeous dye made out of red cabbage. Choose a tiny red cabbage, or better yet, choose the withered bits of red cabbage at the bottom of the vegetable bin. You don’t need to be able to eat them. Cut them into strips and place them in a large pot that is half full of water. Add a few tablespoons of vinegar, and boil. Over the next half an hour, the vinegar will remove the cabbage color from the cabbage and add it to the water, making a stunning dye. While this dye looks purple, it will actually make things a beautiful robin’s egg blue.
You can also make dyes with beets, onion skins, coffee, and tumeric. However, lay low on the eating of the coffee and tumeric dyes – that is, if you want your baby or toddler to sleep that evening!
What to do with your goop? Well, after you run it through your hands, there are more things to try. How about:
1. Finding sieves of various sizes and letting the goop run through the sieves
2. Using rocks, sticks, and spoons. Dip them into the goop and spread the goop around. Picking up these objects helps your toddler develop small motor skills.
3. Use small sponges and make dots with your goop.
4. Use big old paintbrushes and paint boards, large rocks, or big pieces of scrap paper with your goop. Butcher’s paper works well because it is slick – remove the goop and start all over again.
5. At the end, take a bath with your goop. Make it into different colors and paint the tub. Then run the water, run some of the colors down the drain, and take a bath to clean up. Be careful getting out of the tub and remove the traces of cornstarch afterwards, because it can make things slippery.
What others sorts of gluey and sticky materials do you and your baby or toddler like to play with?