Colored Scented Shaving Cream in the Water Table

(E was 2 years and 8 months old.)

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Materials for Colored, Scented Shaving Cream in the Water Table:

• Shaving cream.
• Powdered drink mix.
• Water table.
• Spoons (optional).
• Water (optional).

How to make colored scented shaving cream:  

We used the cheapest shaving cream we could find {it so happened that the biggest bottle at our dollar store was the for men variety; women’s smells better but it didn’t matter because the scent was masked by the powdered drink mix}, E added the drink mix and poured water on top to mix it. I was thinking more in terms of mixing it with her hands or a spoon when I set up the activity but the water was a good way to go as well 😉

As far as the drink mix goes, I started out using Kool Aid which I thought was pretty inexpensive, until I came across Flavor Aid. From what I can tell, it’s pretty much identical to Kool Aid {for my purposes at least, we don’t drink either brand, only use them for sensory activities}, and 12 packages of 6 flavors are $1. I’m sure you can use other brands of instant drink mix depending on what’s available where you are.

{This is not a sponsored post, just discussing what I found.}

What E did with it:

This was the first activity in quite a while where E got really messy – and we both loved it!

For the set up, I simply made four mounds of shaving cream in the water table and gave E four packages of Flavor Aid.

I’d picked four different flavors to match the four mounds of shaving cream but of course E simply put some of each on each mound, and it all turned out red and strawberry scented 😉

As she likes to do to get into any sensory activity we do these days, she started out “cooking” and warned me to stay away because it was very hot 🙂

I love how she wiggled around to make sure her tummy got covered in shaving cream too 😀

Apparently, the area around the water table seemed too clean to her, so she started really splashing around, mostly succeeding in not hitting me with the shaving cream 😉

While I was getting the hose ready, E went ahead and dumped out the water table, and generally handled most of the clean up herself.

• Please note that the drink mix does stain under the right conditions. For us, E’s hands and upper body were bright red in places when she was done with this activity, and I expected it to take a while to fade. However, a short bath was all it took to wash almost all of it off again – there were still some smudges around her fingernails but you had to look closely.
  A visitor to the house definitely wouldn’t have been able to tell that she’d been bright red only minutes earlier.
  E also got some of the shaving cream on the wall and wooden bench that was in the area, and it all rinsed off without a trace.
  I’m not too sure about the mechanics of the staining since E’s shorts didn’t get stained at all, even though she poured red water down her belly and right unto her shorts.
• Red drink mix is the most intense, so color mixing really wasn’t in the cards.

Additional suggestions:

• Leave your shaving cream unscented and color it with food coloring, powdered or liquid tempera or liquid water colors.
• Use vanilla extract for a different way of scenting it {I haven’t actually tried this but want to – let me know how it works out if you do this.}.
• Instead of in a water table, put shaving cream in the bathtub {great for a rainy day!}, the play pool {see our activity with water beads and shaving cream in the play pool}, or simply on a tarp on the ground.

Inspiration: Learn Play Imagine’s Kool Aid Play Date.

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