Sometimes, I feel like doing something ridiculously fun with my kiddos, just something foolish. But other times, I feel like there should be a little lesson inside…something to tease their mind. I was on this bent the other day to do just that. I wanted to do a little STEM activity with my toddler, but wasn’t quite sure what kind of activity could really be achieved with a 2 year old. Then it hit me. I could make a Fizzing Volcano Invitation to Play. A volcano she could control, make fizz and maybe we could talk about our planet and some of the cool features–like volcanos. And maybe have some fun, too. Heh.
Ingredients for a Fizzing Volcano Invitation to Play
Lava Rocks
- 1 cup baking soda
- 1/4 cup water
- 4-10 drops red food coloring
- 4-10 drops yellow food coloring
Volcano
- 1 batch Mud Pie Play Dough
Magic Fizz-Maker
- 2 small squirt bottles full of vinegar
How to Make a Fizzing Volcano Invitation to Play
- Make your Mud Pie Play Dough and put it in your play container, shaping it like a volcano. Be sure to make a deep crater to fit a lot of the lava rocks in.
- Make your lava rocks by mixing the 1/2 baking soda and one color of the food coloring together with a whisk.
- Add 1/4 of the water and mix thoroughly. If the mixture sticks together enough to form balls with, don’t add more water–if not, then add a little more water until you can form balls.
- Repeat with the other half of the baking soda and the second color of food coloring.
- Taking a small portion of each color baking soda mixture, form balls and place in the volcano, around the volcano and elsewhere, just inside the play-container.
- Place squirty-bottles of vinegar in a child’s (preferably your child’s) hands.
- Watch out because fizzing is about to happen.
Um, so, as you can tell, this was one heck of a mess. My biggest mistake was putting this invitation to play in a cardboard box. I don’t know what I was thinking…I seriously thought, “Oh, this’ll be great, I’ll just toss the whole box and the mess will be 100% gone when we’re done. WRONG. More like “I’ll have to wipe the whole kitchen down and some when we’re done.” Best to just do this activity in a plastic tub or something! LOL!
The only thing that saved me from insanity during the clean-up was the awesome new Clorox® Disinfecting Wipes with Micro-Scrubbers I found available at Target the other day. They’re made to not only wipe away germs, dirt and grease, they’ve got this funky-cool texture to scrub stubborn messes (like a giant mound of mud pie volcano-leavings) that other wipes just can’t tackle. So, I was pretty stoked to be able to clean and disinfect this mess in one easy step. It was literally a case of wipe and go.
After reading the label, I found these wipes kill 99.9% of germs that can live on surfaces for up to 48 hours (YIKES!), so I started scrubbing the baby’s highchair. That includes Viruses* and Bacteria, Staph†, E.Coli‡, Salmonella§, Strep**…so then I made a B-line for the playroom and our nappy couch.
See, we bought this couch for the playroom so I could let Jelly, our toddler, roam free while I nursed Donut, our new baby. But as I’ve previously, freely admitted, breastfeeding is a messy business. So is raising a toddler. So, the couch cushion next to where I usually sit: gross, gross, dried nastiness, gross-mc-grosserson. The scrubby texture and thicker wipe of the Clorox® Disinfecting Wipes with Micro-Scrubbers totally blew me away with their efficacy. I could totally use these anywhere and disinfect my entire world! BWAHAHAHA!
