Playing with Goop Outside

I hope all the mothers and grandmothers reading this had a great Mothers day yesterday :)

Here is what my girls made me for Mother's Day :) A huge oatmeal cookie, with purple frosting and sprinkles :) Maddie made it all by herself, with some help from Sammie, while I ran into town yesterday morning. It was very tasty and almost all gone now.

It was another beautiful day here, so we spent most of the afternoon outside playing.

I had set this activity of up for the girls as it's one of Sammie's favourite things to do inside and I figured she would love to play with outside as well.

Well, it didn't go quite as well as I had hoped. There is just so much interesting stuff to do and see outside that it just didn't have the same appeal outside as it does inside.

So I just left it out and let her play what she wanted to play with and took some pictures whenever she came over to quickly play with it before she went off to do something else.

The activity was making and playing with "goop", which is cornstarch and water. :) I"m not sure what the ratio of water to cornstarch is. We just mix until it feels right lol

If you have never played with, you really need to try it :) It looks like a solid, but if you touch it without any pressure, it feels like a liquid. I love picking some up, squeezing it into a ball and then relaxing my hand to let it turn back into a liquid and run all over my hand :) Sammie loves setting her hands on top of it and letting them sink into it :) I love this stuff, it feels so neat.

I dumped about a box and a half of cornstarch in one the bins in the water table and set out the spray bottles of water mixed with water colours and let the girls spray and mix :)

Look who got to join us outside for a bit :) Austin didn't want to nap at all, so he played outside with us for a bit. I thought afterwards that I should have tried to get him to interact with the goop too, but didn't think of it at the time.

It took a lot of spraying, dumping and mixing. Maddie did most of the work lol Sammie just wanted to spray and dump :)

Finally "goop" :)

Sammie letting her hands sink into the goop :)

Lately Sammie has decided that she doesn't like her hands to be messy. I set out a tub of water so that she could rinse her hands off. That became a new game, she would cover her hands in the goop and then go right over to the rinse tub and rinse her hands off. Then repeat over and over lol By the end of the playing, the tub of water was almost goop itself :)

I love how the colours swirl around making a neat design ;)

Maddie was burying Sammie's hands

Maddie covered her hand in the goop and waited to see what it would look like after it dried

Daddy came home and everyone had to stop and go see him :)

I learnt a valuable lesson today through this activity. Just because I want, would like or expect Sammie to play and enjoy a craft or activity, that doesn't mean that she will. She can decide for herself if she is interested in something or not :) Sometimes she is just interested in doing random things, not just one specific thing.

I never forced her to play with the goop, although I might have suggested it a couple of times, but I just left the stuff out and eventually she came over and played with it in between playing and exploring other things.

Anyways, we all had a lot of fun spending the day outside on Mother's Day :)

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