What do gel food dye, borax, shaving cream, cornstarch & cream of tartar have in common? All of these are on my “must buy” list when it comes to school supplies (in addition to the obvious things like glue, markers and construction paper). You can make so many things with those five ingredients!
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Gel food dye – I use it in edible paints, like the ones we have made to paint our pancakes. We have also used it to dye anything that has to be bright, like paintable chalk and of course playdough.
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Borax – This is a necessary ingredient in goop. We are obsessed with goop over here! I love how mess-free this play medium is and am amazed with all the ways we use it to learn.
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Shaving Cream – this is the base I use to make our fingerpaints. It is a lot of fun for sensory learning! And you can even clean wood surfaces with it – have crayon on your table, no fear, shaving cream to the rescue!
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Cornstarch – We have had lots of fun learning about germs and how they are spread (in place of glitter), making and molding with moonsand, and of course it is another ingredient in both goop and in numerous of our paint recipes, like bathtub paint.
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Cream of Tartar – this elusive ingredient is hard to find at our grocery store. We use it in creating playdough. I have made playdough without it before, but it wasn’t as elastic. Cream of Tartar is great for playdough!
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So, what fun things were on your back-to-school list?

Thanks Laffy for the picture!

This post idea, to test our sunscreen by painting on our paper with sunscreen and leaving them out in the sun, was inspired by the comment by Lady in a Small Town in my earlier post, Sun-bleached Alphabet Puzzle. She said that she’d heard of an experiment where they painted with sunscreen and watched the sun bleach the paper except for the painted portions. It sounded like fun! We added the Scientific method as I have always wondered which type of sunscreen was more effective: rub-on or …

What do you have when you mix school glue, cornstarch, water, food coloring and a tiny bit of borax? Goop! This homemade silly putty is marvelous stuff! We use it like playdough as it doesn’t leave residue! Yay for mess-less play! Last week a friend came over and we popped the goop. Many of our activities are things I come up with, but I can’t take any credit for this alphabet review. Quirky Kid Z decided that making prints with his letters was the …

I was inspired to make these paper puzzles after reading the post by S.B. of, S.B. Creatively, she took advantage of the summer sun to create a mat where her kids practiced letter identification. We adapted it to create a few puzzles for my youngest. We created one with alphabet magnets and another with different shaped blocks from around the house.

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How to make a bleached puzzle?

You need construction paper.  The cheaper the better.  I used high quality art paper the first time and it didn’t bleach well.
A sunny …

Want to know which preschool-related sites from the world wide web regularly wow me?  Where I get some of the inspiration for my posts?  Which sites do I regularly hound?  These are my top ten favorite early childhood education sites!  Please know that this is not all inclusive, there are tons of other sites that I love and follow but if I have to pick, these are the first that come to my mind.
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Let the Children Play – Not only is her preschool blog a lot of fun, but Jenny’s  …

My oldest preschooler loves Starfall and loves her dolls, why not combine them into a review lesson? Remember our funky painted clothespins from yesterday? Well, today my oldest was playing one of her favorite sections on Starfall, All About Me, and when she was finished we decided to review the words together with a few of her dolls and our clothespins. As she was playing her computer game I wrote down a number of the words she interacted with on sticker paper: Girl, boy, head, face, hair, …

My preschoolers love to paint – and I love to spice up life a bit! Who wants to eat pretzels from a boring bag clothed up with a plain old clip? Not me!
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…and viola! We have some fun and funky clothespins!
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Do you have any fun painting projects you’ve done with your kids lately?