Dig your fingers in to the sand and enjoy this sensory experience! With this simple activity you can not only enjoy hours of playing and building in the sand, but it can be easily made with only two ingredients! How do you think this sensory experience will help spark your creativity and relieve some stress?
Supplies:
- 2 cups of flour
- 1⁄2 cup of baby oil
- Mixing bowl
- Tray, sheetpan, or large tupperware container (you can also use a paper plate or bowl!)
- Whisk or fork (optional)
- Quart or gallon-sized Ziploc bag for storage
Before we start, make sure you have gathered all of your supplies! It might be helpful to also
grab a paper towel to wipe off your hands if need be!
Step 1: First, we are going to grab our mixing bowl and put it in front of us as well as our flour and our measuring cup! Go ahead and measure out 2 cups of flour and dump it into your mixing bowl. If you don’t know how to measure 2 cups, that is okay! A caregiver or maybe a sibling can help you with this!
Step 2: Now we are going to set aside the measuring cup and flour and grab our 1⁄2 measuring cup and baby oil! Fill your 1⁄2 measuring cup with baby oil and dump it right on top of the flour that is inside of your mixing bowl. Again, if you need help, feel free to ask someone around you!
Step 3: Great job! This last part is super simple! All you have to do is mix the flour and baby oil together! It is best to use your hands as this is a sensory activity, but if it’s less messy for you to use a whisk or a fork in this step, that works as well!
Step 4: Perfect! Now that it’s all mixed up, you might have noticed that the color has changed and gone from white to a tan/yellow color. That means that it’s all mixed in and ready to go!
From here, you can either play with it in the mixing bowl or pour it into a tupperware container or onto a tray to play with! You can also put other objects in it such as legos or animal figurines and with only 2 ingredients you can create more whenever you need!
Step 5: Yay! You have successfully created your 2 ingredient moon sand! Now that we’ve
created our moon sand, we can play with it and explore what a sensory experience is!
You might be wondering, what is a sensory experience? Well, it’s an activity that helps us further use and focus on 1 of our 5 senses - taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound! This activity can utilize many of our senses, but with this, we are mainly focusing on our sense of touch!
What other sensory experiences that you can think of that utilize touch? Maybe silly putty, slime, mud? The options are endless!
Now that we know what a sensory experience is, how do you think this relates to stress and
learning how to deal with our emotions in a positive way? Well, sometimes, when we get
overwhelmed or anxious it can be really hard to not focus on that overwhelming thought or
feeling, right? Maybe you got embarrassed and you can’t stop thinking about how you wish it hadn’t happened, or you have a test coming up and the more you try to prepare for it, the more stressed you become! Hanging out in that stressful thought over and over doesn’t help it go away, does it? Right, it doesn’t! So instead a sensory experience such as this can help you focus on 1 of your 5 senses instead!
I encourage you to utilize this activity just for fun or maybe when you are starting to feel overwhelmed and need a break! You can put other objects in it such as legos or animal figurines and with only 2 ingredients you can create more whenever you need! The whole point is to use your hands to feel the sand and spend some time playing and focusing on how it feels and even how it looks as you create things!
To store your sand to play with later you can put it in a tupperware container or even a Ziploc
bag!
I hope you enjoyed learning about 2 ingredient moon sand and the sensory benefits it can give you when you are feeling stressed and need a reset!
~Made by Becca B.