Play: Sensory kits from Tickle Your Senses

It seems like the haze would be lingering around until November, and the kids are still spending most days at home. Co-ops have been cancelled, and we've been doing a lot more art and craft (see this post for our list of simple crafts to try). They've also been pretty good at playing on their own too, coming up with imaginary parties and picnics and pirate adventures!

While play ranks highly on our list of things to do, I must admit I've quite neglected the aspect of sensory play, since it entails a fair bit of mess, especially when you have someone like Lil J! I've been wanting to make myself a batch of playdough for the longest time, since that seems to be one of the less messy sensory activities (compared to sand or rice!), but well, you know how things are. So when the folks over at Tickle Your Senses asked if we were keen to try out their sensory kits, I had to say yes!

We got to choose a playdough kit, as well as a water beads kit. For playdough, I went with the body parts playdough kit, since I thought the kids would enjoy making various creatures using the parts:   

It turned out I was right! They loved making monsters and pancake faces, and snowmen and what not. To reduce the mess, each kid got a tub of dough, as well as a placemat to work on, and everyone shuffled the body parts and took turns using them. I didn't let them mix the colours (at least for now), since I didn't want to end up with muddy brown balls of mixed up dough. 

Lil J took a sniff upon opening his tub and exclaimed "it smells like lavender, Mama!". And he was right. The folks add a drop of lavendar essential oil to their dough, to add to the sensory play, and I admit that was a nice touch, since most commercial doughs don't exactly smell very good. You also have the option of having your doughs unscented, should the smell bother your child. Just select that option when shopping at their site.

All three boys ended up playing for over an hour with the dough, and made so many different funny creatures! The dough was soft and not flaky, so the cleaning up was minimal, especially since we used placemats. I was told that their dough is made using plain flour, salt, water, cream of tartar, oil and food coloring, so playing with it should not be a problem for kids with sensitive skin. The body parts were made of sturdy plastic. One or two parts had sharp bits, which you tend to find with small plastic toys, however, these were easily broken off or filed down. (But as for all toys, do always check for sharp parts, before giving them to your kids to play.)

After a while, the boys moved on from making creatures, to doing other things with the dough. They hid body parts and pretended to excavate them at a dinosaur dig. They made pancakes to eat. They poked holes here and there.

Given that the dough should last for 2-3 months if stored properly in their tubs (side point, I love the tubs that the dough comes in, since these can be re-used for so many purposes!), I think we'll be seeing a lot more playdough sessions in the weeks to come!

In terms of the water beads kit, we chose the green water beads sea creature kit, simply because we knew Baby J would go crazy over the octopus. The kit came with two squeeze bath toys, a shovel and strainer, as well as a jar of water beads and a packet of dehydrated water beads. 

We've yet to use this kit yet, as I'm saving this for another hazy day, but we did try growing half of the packet of dehydrated beads. This was how they looked, before we added water:

And this was the water beads after we soaked them in water for a couple of hours! (I didn't change the container, so you can see how much they have swelled up.) The beads seem bigger than those that are purchased from Daiso. The plastic tools are well made, and I liked how the handles of the shovel and strainer can be removed so that they are easier to store. 

We'll share more on our FB page when we do get down to using the beads for sensory play. Do note that shipping goes at a flat rate fee of $7 for courier service (regular post is not available, as they do not want their water beads/dough to be affected by heat or mishandling), so you can look at pooling your orders with your friends. Orders above $80 qualify for free shipping. Also, as part of their haze boredom buster promotion, they are guaranteeing next day delivery for orders made before 7 pm, at no extra charge!

All in all, I think a fair bit of thought went into designing each kit, and I especially like the convenience of being able to order home-made playdough, and have it come with tools that you can keep for future sessions. We will definitely be ordering more playdough kits soon!

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Tickle Your Senses is kindly sponsoring a giveaway of a playdough kit and a water beads kit to two readers of this blog! To take part in the giveaway, please follow the instructions in the Rafflecopter widget below. For more information, please visit the Tickle Your Senses website, as well as "like" their Facebook page to get more updates and promotions. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclaimer: We were sponsored a playdough and a water beads kit for purpose of the review, and no monetary compensation was received. All opinions are my own.

Survive the haze: 11 crafty activities to try

The haze has been keeping us indoors most of the time, since the boys start coughing and wheezing if they are exposed. Because of that, we've had more time to craft. I must say I quite enjoy our craft sessions these days since Baby J is happy messing with his crayons and dot-a-dot markers, while Lil J is now willing to follow instructions and not make a huge mess with the art materials. Junior J, as usual, loves painting and crafting, so he's more than happy to take part too!

I thought I'd compile a list of crafty activities that we've been doing the past 6 months, some which never got recorded on the blog (but shared on the FB page). You could try some of these at home with the kids when the PM2.5 levels shoot up. Have fun!

1. Spin Art: 
The boy have been loving their spinner (we purchased it here), especially Lil J who is particularly interested in the kinesthetic part of crafting. He loves cranking the button and squeezing the bottles, and seeing the paint splatter onto the paper, so I'd highly recommend this activity for kids who are more keen in the sensorial bit of art (smearing paint, working tools). Having the spinner means they get to see the painting process, however, you can also try this using a regular salad spinner, just that they won't be able to see the paint spread out as they spin the spinner.

2. Watercolour collages: 

We made this picture for the MIL recently, and now Lil J has been asking to try his hand at "dabbing". (You can read more details for this project here.) The older two enjoy experimenting with the paints, and watching how the paint spreads, and how the colours vary as they layer them. 

3 & 4. Washi-fied names & paint resist art:
We purchased these wooden alphabets from TYPO (you can also try cutting out alphabets using cardboard), and the older two had a field day covering them with washi tape! (Washi tape can be purchased from Daiso, various scrapbooking stores, and from MT Tape.)

The painting below the alphabets was made using the paint resist technique: Junior J drew the picture using a white oil pastel (you must draw the outline a couple of times and layer it thick), and then added the colours using watercolours. This works on paper, as well as canvas, and you can purchase canvases from Daiso or Art Friend.



5. Painting on canvas:
Junior J has tried using acrylics on canvas previously (the top two paintings were done with acrylic paints), but we stopped using these paints during this period because our windows were closed because of the haze, and I didn't want him breathing in too much of the paint fumes. However, poster paints work on canvas too, so we'll be exploring using those (the lower painting was done by Junior J using washi tapes and poster paints, when he was younger).



6. Ice-cream stick animals:
The kids in our co-op made these animals while exploring a farm theme, and they were quite easy to make! All you need are coloured ice-cream sticks (Daiso and Popular stock these), circle stickers (from Daiso), markers and coloured paper. The possibilities are endless, and you can add pompoms and googly eyes too!



7. Shape art: 
We experimented making pictures using shape cut-outs (we cut out shapes from construction paper) and circle stickers (these come in a few sizes in Daiso), after reading the book Wednesday, a sweet story about how a circle and square work together to form pictures. This was fun, and the boys loved thinking up pictures to make!

8. Beetle art:
The boys made these beetles after reading "The Beetle Book". They had quite alot of fun picking out which beetles they wanted to make, and made these using bits of cardboard, googly eyes and pipe cleaners (from CraftPlay, which stocks all sorts of materials for crafting). They decorated the beetles using glitter glue, markers and buttons. You can read more details for this project over in this post, along with more beetle projects!

9. Perler bead crafts:
We've been making all sorts of things using Perler beads, from giant cameras for the younger boys (using Biggie Beads), to My Little Pony and fruit magnets for a fund-raising project.

We keep getting questions about these beads, so just some info about these fused beads here:

- You place the beads on a pegboard in the pattern that you like, and iron them at a medium heat setting to fuse them together. You'll need to place a sheet of paper on top of the beads before ironing or the beads will stick to the iron. You can either use the papers provided in the bead sets, or baking paper. Don't use regular paper!

- There are a few brands of beads available, and IKEA stocks a similar version called Pyssla, and I think Daiso sells some fused bead kits as well. The most popular brands would probably be Hama and Perler. The former is available at Growing Fun stores, but we prefer the latter, as Hama beads tend to be much softer and the creations tend to break easily compared to those made using Perler beads.

- We buy our beads mainly from Amazon, as they qualify for free global shipping. We usually purchase the giant tub of mixed beads for Lil J, and the trays of sorted colours for Junior J when he works on his fund-raising project, as well as the pegboards (some of our pegboards are from IKEA). The Biggie beads and corresponding pegboards are from Amazon too. We've also ordered packets of beads of individual colours directly from EKSuccess, for the fund-raising project.

10. Build your own city:
We sometimes cut up a large cardboard box, or roll out mahjong paper and let the kids build their own city using their building blocks. They add roads and other details using markers, and have a ball of a time building their own city! (You can read more about our cardboard crafts here.)

11. Make your own aquarium:

We got the boys to paint a large piece of cardboard using blue, yellow and white poster paints, and called it our aquarium. They then filled it up with various aquatic creatures, such as fishes folded from origami paper, seahorses using Perler beads and sea urchins using pompoms!

So you have it, 11 crafty activities to try with the kids, during this hazy period. Have fun if you do try any of them!

PS: This post contains affiliate links to Amazon, but at no added cost to yourself. :)