Slime!

Messy play is a very good therapy for all children, but especially good for children with sensory integration problems. Our son, Dan, used to hate sand and fur and had a bit of a fascination about hair. I'm sure that playing at the garden table with bubbles, play-dough and slime has helped him. It's also been a lot of fun. It can be a bit of a challenge to tidy minded parents though!

Because it has been a bit bracing outside, we have given messy play a bit of a rest. However, we have a couple of young teenagers who come and play with Dan on Tuesdays after school, and they seemed appropriate and deserving characters for a bit of "creamy muck-muck". Holly is a very good girl and is in no way to blame for what happened, but I'm not so sure about Sophie who is a real prankster. We love them both, of course.

When we had snow, the girls brought a big bowl of it in to the living room for Dan to play with. He spooned it from one bowl to another, then I added some food colouring (not yellow), and a new idea was born.

This week, we decided to risk an in-door messy play session with slime which is made with corn-flour (corn-starch) and water. You pour some cornflour in a bowl and then add a drop of water at a time until you get a runny paste. You can add colour too. The fun starts here because it behaves as a liquid unless you surprise it by grabbing it or hitting it. It becomes a solid, just for a moment. You can pummel it into a ball, but as soon as you stop moving it it flows again.

So, Dan played with slime at the sink while the girls experimented with different additives, such as Gelli Baff in a bowl on the floor. The idea is to enjoy handling the stuff, but the girls tried its many properties, such as adhesion and opacity, on all the surrounding surfaces and any handy objects. Then they tried paddling in it. This could become a family tradition but, perhaps it would be best in the garden?