Friday, June 17, 2011

The King of Flour!

IIIII, am the KING OF FLOUR!!!!!!
"A kilo of flour everywhere doesn't mean anyone gets angry, it means the next couple of hours playing joyfully with our kids, making flour patterns, peeping through flour clouds, creating meteorite impacts into flour and cinnamon, dressing up as 'floury kings', and giggling at floury fairy footprints. Fifteen minutes clean up for the joy of helping him follow his curiosity. So incredibly worth it :)" -- Tam

Kids are curious! That's how they're designed to learn about the world.

If you'd rather the next bag of flour not be played with, put it up out of kid reach :-) Don't make it their responsibility not to touch. See the world through curious kid eyes and make your house a safe place where kids can explore. Including safe from frustrated moms who should know that a whole bag of flour has way more uses than cookies in the eyes of a child :-)

Respect a need for tactile exploration. If you have tactile kids, find ways they can play with flour. When Kat was that age, I bought the cheapest bag of white flour and let her play with it in the tub and scooped it into a bowl to play with again. And again. And again. (Do cover the drain if you try that! White flour is good for making clogs as well as cookies ;-) Play with flour outside.

Find other things they can get their fingers -- and whole bodies -- into. Pudding. Finger paints. (Kat did lots of painting in the bath tub too :-) Rice. (I had a big bin of cheap rice that Kat loved burying her Pokemon in.) Shaving cream.

Let go of the voices in your head that say doing anything other than eating food is a waste. A bag of flour? Way cheaper than most toys and can even last for years if you decide to save it.

Sarah's sons also flouring up :-)
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1 comment:

  1. Sprout, Squidge and MoppetJune 17, 2011 at 5:15 PM

    Ah you've just reminded me of the other thing both my boys *love* playing with (when they're not opening bags of flour!) - rice! We put a big tray out and a big tub of cheap rice, and they're engrossed for hours sometimes. They sometimes put their little matchbox cars and diggers in and make it into a construction yard, or their trains and 'transport' the rice around, or pots and funnels to pour it... the list is endless :)
    The other thing that's sprung to mind reading this post is 'clean mud', where you grate a bar of white soap, mix it with a bit of warm water, and add a shredded roll of toilet paper. The more it's squeezed and played with the softer it becomes, it's fantastic stuff! And when they've finished with it, it can be kept in a plastic bag until they want to play with it again.
    Other sensory touch things that my two enjoy playing with are shaving foam, cornflour/water mixture, and borax/pva slime.

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