Foam Dough

Monday afternoon after Alexa woke up from nap I was feeling frisky. I decided that it was definitely a messy play kind of day. I looked on my Pinterest wall to see what kind of play dough type recipe I could whip up and found foam dough. You can find the original Pinterest recipe here. I was not interested in making a whole ton of this foam dough without having first tested it out. Believe it or not, there are way too many Pinterest Fails out there. I came up with my own recipe that still allowed us to have a great time, but didn't waste all the shaving cream and corn starch in the house.

In a clean, dry bucket I placed 5 heaping tablespoons of corn starch. I let Alexa pick which color we would dye the foam dough. She chose yellow and blue. I added a little bit of yellow and a little bit of blue food coloring to a glass and poured a couple of tablespoons of water on top and mixed it together. We only have the gel food coloring, so I wanted it mixed with water before adding it to the bucket. I topped it with approximately 2-3 cups of shaving cream (really I just squirted the shaving cream out until I thought it was enough).

Alexa instantly grabbed for the shaving cream and put a handful of it in her mouth. She didn't mind how it tasted, however I told her that we don't eat shaving cream and she was satisfied enough not to do it again. I started mixing the ingredients together and it very quickly started to form a very soft dough. I grabbed some cups and clothespins to add to our sensory bucket. We played for over an hour with the green foam dough. At one point I added more shaving cream and the dough got very sticky and gooey. That was a great change in the sensory experience.

One of the reasons I liked this dough so much was that it changed as you played with it. As the shaving cream foam lost it's airyness, the dough seemed to dry up a bit. It continued to be maliable and soft and fun to play with whether extra gooey or dry. We will definitely play with this again.

I thought clean up was going to be pretty time consuming with this activity, but it wasn't. I dumped the bucket of dough into the garbage and was able to easily sweep up whatever had fallen onto the balcony floor.