Over the past couple of years, I have slowly found myself in a position of teaching preschoolers…and shock of all shock, I enjoy it. Scratch that. I love it. I found my people in a group of 3 and 4 year olds.
As the years have passed, I’ve been given more and more freedom in the room and have even flown solo in a group of preschoolers where I am far outnumbered.
While I have never really had, long-term goals in life -I can say without hesitation, that being a preschool teacher, full-time, is something I am pursuing. So, you know, stay tuned.
All that is to say, that today I was in the preschool room again and was looking for a fun, (but easy) but messy! -activity.
My style tends to be messy. The bigger the mess, the better. Of course, when you are working with 3 and 4 year olds, they eat it all up. Maybe that is why we get along. I don’t know. I just know that I eat up all the messy crafts. All the time. All in the name of science or sensory.
We’ve done moon-dough (sorry parents), Puffy paint with shaving cream and glue, spray paint (again, sorry parents for sending your children home covered in blue paint that was SUPPOSED to be washable. I swear it was!). I’ve done Oobleck and slime. All the hands on messy activities -sign me up!
Today’s activity almost didn’t happen because apparently baking soda is a rare commodity these days -but I finally secured me a few boxes and went to work. I’ve seen it called different things but that general idea seems to be called “Fizzy paint”.
In short -you take some water color paper, cover it with baking soda, then use eyedroppers to drop vinegar (we added food coloring) onto it. The reaction creates a fizzy mixture that is cool to watch.
Once it dries, you scrape the baking soda off and are left with a cool watercolor tie-dye painting of sorts. I know, I’m so very technical with my wording.
It really is the gift that keeps on giving.
The kids rated it 20/10 -saying they wished we could do this EVERYDAY ALL DAY!
They were very careful about making small drops (as per my instruction) until they realized you could make pools of colored vinegar…I was slightly worried their papers would rip under the weight of it all…plus the vinegar started to run off the edge of the table, so we called it quits there.
The finished products were pretty cool tho.
I might just blow their minds one day and bring in a tray of baking soda and let them add the vinegar and play with it. Who knows. I like to live on the wild side.
Tangled Thoughts 