Foam Dough

One of my goals for this year is to do some more sensory play with JJ and Bee. (Sensory play encourages the use of various senses; to look, hear, smell, taste or touch while they play).

Sensory doughs are an excellent medium to explore the sense of touch. Some are oozy, some are crumbly, some are soft. And some explore other senses as well, like smell and taste.

I’ve tended to shy away from making our own dough at home for too long now: I feared the mess; I feared the prep work; I feared that the effort will be greater than the reward. But after seeing how much JJ and Bee liked the Play Snow last month, I’ve decided to put fears aside and let the kids get messy!

And so it was extremely timely when my friend Dayna from Lemon Lime Adventures put out a 12 Months of Sensory Dough challenge. Yup, I’m in!

Want to play too? Well, the idea is to make a different type of sensory dough each month, starting with Foam Dough for January, Cloud Dough for February, Edible Play Dough for March, and so on.

So what is foam dough?

Glad you asked. 🙂

It’s cornflour + shaving cream + (optional) red & blue food colouring (because JJ is obsessed with purple).

(Just to make things confusing, what we call cornflour in Australia, is called cornstarch in America. And what what we call cornstarch in Australia is called cornflour in America. The one I mean is white and powdery, not yellow and powdery…)

Mixing it together is more than half the fun. Shaving cream is so fluffy to touch and smells so clean! And watching the red and blue colours mix together is a great colour mixing lesson.

We used a 500g packet of cornflour, but I didn’t measure out the shaving cream. I just kept squirting and squirting and squirting until the mixture looked about right.

Once it’s all combined, foam dough is crumbly, yet mouldable. With shaving cream being a main ingredient, I was expecting it to be fluffy or sticky, but it isn’t. It’s soft. It’s very similar in texture to Play Snow, but the shaving cream made it more fun to make.

I provided JJ with some paper cupcake cups / liners / cases (what are these things called again) and of course she made a birthday cake and told her joke.

Hilarious. Or at least JJ thinks so.

She discovered that if you turn the cupcake upside down, you can make a sand castle. They work much better than most of the ‘real’ sandcastles she’s tried, as there is no need to add any water.

So she proceeded to make about a hundred.

After a while I brought out a few letter cookie cutters. We talked about how the letter F makes a ‘f’ sound and I asked her if there was anything she could see that started with a ‘f’, and she immediately said Foam Dough. Yay! Learning the starting sounds of words is one of the first steps to reading, and is something that JJ is enjoying toying with at the moment.

Given JJ’s sensory obsession of feeling things with her feet, this was always going to happen. And so we counted toes.

Once the feet were in, well, there’s no stopping! Lucky that I had set it up outside. 😉

Want to play along? Then make some – it’s fun! Yes it’s messy, but if you do it outside, and close enough to bathtime, then it’s manageable. I don’t know why I was afraid of the prepwork – JJ did all the mixing for me! And was it worth the effort – every single bit.

And a tip from a non-pro? Wash your hands before you pick up your camera to take photos, or risk getting powder all over the $1000 camera lens. Oops.

Enjoy the beautiful sensory mess!

xx Danya