I have pinned so many great activities on my Montessori and Pre-school board. I decided to pick out a few ideas to take with me up to Alaska. When we were up there five months ago the girls got at each other a bit and I wanted to have some things ready to go. Luckily they played better this time, but activities were still handy. I found this and this a while ago, and thought, “clean mud, awesome!” Ok, it was awesome, but to be fair, it’s not that clean of a project! First of all, how weird is Ivory soap? I mean weird in an awesome way. Check out what happens when you microwave it for 45 seconds:

That’s about a quarter a bar, it’s so awesome! A note, it did take me a while to find Ivory Soap, and I don’t think other brands work. The local grocery store had it (in Alaska). The first night we played with the soap I let the kids paint it with watercolors. It was ok. I think I might try it again, but now that Tuesday knows it makes mud I don’t know if she’ll want to do it. It’s also quite crumbly.

So the big hit comes when you crumble this stuff up, mix it with toilet paper, torn into pieces, and add water.

Then you mush it all together (I did this part mostly).

“Oh it’s so squishy!”

So about that clean part…

I mean it’s basically soap, and dried it’s basically dried soap on everything. What am I doing in the background there?

Getting lots of soap off of miss Tuesday! We tried to get as much off as possible before letting anything down the drain; we were afraid it would clog it up. I was worried about all the soap on Tuesday’s sensitive skin, but it didn’t seem to bother her at all. And despite the messiness of clean mud I really liked the activity. I thought it was a great sensory experience, and perfect for open ended play. We just gave them each one spoon and cup and they played for quite a while.
And a note on the photos: I brought with me to Alaska only my iPhone and a new point and shoot for photos. Bj really wanted to support my Project Life endeavor this year and was kind enough to get me a smaller camera I could take with me. First he got me a Panasonic DMC-LX5. I tried it out for a weekend and I just couldn’t get it to feel right to me. I thought it had too much grain and I thought the pictures were about on par with my iPhone (4s), or at least not so much better that I’d actually get it out. I asked him about a camera Sciarrino has, and he got me the newer model a Canon PowerShot S100. I’m liking it, but it’s still not my DSLR (I have a Nikon D300 with variouslenses. I mean, of course it’s not, right? But I am getting decent photos from it, it shoots in RAW, which is great because the one downside to having a point and shoot is the inability of manufacturers to put every function at your fingertips. So having to go into a menu to change focus points, white balance, ISO, etc. is very time consuming. Shooting RAW lets me forget about some of those (mainly I don’t worry about white balance), then I can fix it in Lightroom. Of course if I have time I’d much rather get everything perfect in the camera but the nature of point and shoot photography is that you usually don’t have time. I think I’ll get better at is, and I don’t think I’ll ever ditch my DSLR, but it is nice having something under a pound that fits easily in a bag.