Shaving Cream Sensory Play

When I know the girl is going to be home for an extended period of time — summer break, say — I try to have supplies on hand for a few special crafty/sensory activities we’ve never done together before.

I know she had played with shaving cream and cornstarch at school , but we’d never done it together, so I finally remembered to buy some shaving cream (the cheapest I could find was a foaming gel) and one afternoon we tried it out.

What You’ll Need

• a can of shaving cream
• a box of cornstarch
• food coloring (optional)
• a spoon (optional)
• a tub or tray

What You’ll Do

I looked online for some “recipes” for this one, but really it’s just about dumping and mixing. I let her put in some shaving cream

and some cornstarch.

She wanted to make it pink, so we added some food coloring.

And she stirred.

We added more of all ingredients and kept playing.

Eventually we decided the tub was too big and put it on a tray with some cookie cutters and things we use with playdough.

It was really soft and squishy and I don’t think we did it quite right, because some reports online (like this one from I Can Teach My Child) say that it gets moldable, and this stuff never did.

In fact, it was a giant fluffy mess.

She seemed to enjoy it.

I was afraid to wash it down the drain, so when she was done it all went into a plastic shopping bag in the garbage.

But it was great messy fun while it lasted and I think we’ll definitely try this one again and try to get better proportions on our ingredients. I think this shaving cream sensory play would be a great activity for Frozen-obsessed kiddos (without the pink, of course), because there’s something sort of fluffy snowlike about it.

Have you ever worked with shaving cream and corn starch? I’d love to hear about it!