Super Chunk

I ran across Unplug Your Kids not too long ago; it’s a blog dedicated to the proposition that children don’t need to spend their lives glued to a screen.  They run a weekly link party on a specific unplugged theme, and the theme for this past week was slippery.  Adam and Becky and I all agreed that soap would be a useful thing to explore, and we settled on making Soap Clay from MaryAnn Kohl’s Preschool Art.

We had to begin by grating the soap.  The recipe calls for Ivory Soap Flakes, but we couldn’t find them, so we bought a multipack of Ivory bar soap and ran it through the grater.  Using the smallest holes on my regular box grater (but not the spiky ones - I don’t even know what those are for) made shavings that were plenty fluffy and soft.  For the three of us, we did two bars of soap.  It was easy for the kids to do a good portion of the grating.  (Click for big.)

Next I added water, a little at a time, to make the clay.  The soap started to get slippery (as you might expect) as soon as it got wet, and we all kneaded our own clay individually.  We added food coloring to some of the clay by making an indentation in the middle and kneading it in.

We made some big shapes… and some little shapes… and we all got pretty messy… but here’s the great thing.  Although the soap clay takes color pretty well (which is to say that it wasn’t as pastel as I expected; it was still pretty speckly where the soap didn’t exactly pick up the tint), it’s, um, soap.  Which means that when you’re done, you go rinse with warm water for only a little longer than usual, and your hands are not stained even a little bit unless you miss a spot.  (It also comes off the grater pretty readily; it took a little bit of scrubbing with a nubbly dish cloth, and I’ll run it through the dishwasher again before using it for food, but I am confident that we are good to go.)

Here’s what we ended up with.  The heart, pentagon, and big blue oval thing (it’s totally a robin’s egg, I promise) are mine.  Becky made a pet bed/table, and Adam made a ladybug (which at the moment is on its back, so you can’t see the spots he made with a skewer).  The last big white piece is Becky’s, which she formed when she decided that she didn’t want all of her pieces to be tiny and easily lost.  A funny thing: I think I may have made this stuff when I was actually in preschool.  I didn’t especially like it then, but I had a lot of fun with this project yesterday.