messy dough

I have been trying to plan at least one activity per day to do with J. He is at such a great age right now. He loves to explore and learn, soaking in everything. He is old enough so he is not putting everything into his mouth, and can focus on something for more than 3 minutes. I absolutely love this age. I kind of forgot how great this age is. I worked with 2 year olds at a child care center for a few years, and they are just the best. So funny and innocent, so charming and naughty! :)

Our activities sometimes aren't anything special, they could just be 20 minutes of focused puzzle play or reading. I just like to be intentional about doing an activity each day so the weeks don't go by without me realizing I haven't interacted with my kids besides daily routine. I think that free play is imensely valuable, but I also see a place for "learning/exploring time" each day.

The other night I realized I had some flour in our cupboard that has been in there for quite awhile. Instead of throwing it out (does flour go bad??...) I decided to let the kids play with it. It started out dry and using a sift, and moved to adding water to the flour. From there we also added food coloring. Both H and J loved this activity at the ages 9 (almost 10) and 2.5. H kept saying, "I love this! This is so fun!" J really didn't say much because he was too busy playing and running his hands through the goup. They played for over an hour and J could have probably kept playing for another hour.

we went from this:

to this:



*Helpful tip: Do not wash the flour/water down your kitchen sink when you are done... it hardens up like glue and will clog your pipes! To clean up, I threw the flour outside in the bushes and had the kids wash their hands in a bucket of water that I then threw outside as well.