Baked Cotton Balls
If you need a fun, easy, creative and different way to play, baked cotton balls are an excellent option! I recently heard of the idea from This Grandma is Fun and my boys and I had a little too much fun playing with them. We are currently learning about SNOW this week, so we formed our cotton balls into a snowman. My four really got into it and I helped my two with his. He mostly loved squeezing the paint between his fingers. My little ones especially loved what we did after our snowmen cooked... Here's what you'll need:
- 2 cups flour
- 2 cups water
- Food Coloring
- Cotton Balls
- Baking Sheet
- Tinfoil
- Recommended: Plastic Tablecloth from the Dollar Tree
- To make the paint: Whisk the flour and water together in a large bowl until there are no lumps. Pour the paint into four separate bowls and add a different color of food coloring into each bowl.
- Place a sheet of tinfoil on a baking sheet and draw an image on the tinfoil with permanent marker. We drew snowmen on ours for the boys to fill with cotton balls (see below).
- When you're ready to play, lay out a plastic tablecloth on the ground. Dip the cotton balls in the paint until they're completely covered and place them on the tinfoil wrapped baking sheet. Bake at 300 degrees for 45 minutes.
Before.
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After.
And because my boys love destroying things more than making things, the real fun happened after our snowmen baked. I gave them each a hammer and they pounded their hearts out.
Our baked cotton balls were such a hit, we made a Baked Cotton Ball Letter Smash. After the cotton balls baked, I wrote letters A-Z with a permanent marker on each one. For my four, I said a letter sound and he smashed the correct letter. For my two, I showed him these amazing flashcards and he found the matching letter to smash! It was easier for him to find the letters with different colored cotton balls. "The B is yellow"
