Welcome to the first week of our homeschooling adventure.
To start, I want to clarify our homeschooling method. We are currently not doing traditional homeschooling. What we are doing is ‘distance education’. That means that we are still registered in the regular school system, they give us the curriculum and we do it at home.
Because my daughter was in a split class last year, and has done the first 1/3 of the school year in a regular school, we have had a couple hiccups as we have started out. First off, the curriculum we have been given is taught in a certain order. Teachers in a classroom may teach it in a different order… and they have. We are finding some things she has already done, some things she has never even seen and we are having to do a bit of backtracking. This has been a little stressful, but once it is all sorted out and we find our place, I expect that things will start to move along a little more smoothly.
The other challenge we face in our homeschooling is our toddler. And not only do we have a toddler of our own in the house, three days a week, I have a second toddler in the house for daycare. This creates a lot of chaos tricky environment for learning. And so I find I am having to plan activities to keep the toddlers busy during my teaching time.
This week, I tried out ‘cloud dough’.
Cloud Dough is super simple to make. Just mix 7 cups of flour with 1 cup of baby oil, then….enjoy?
I’ll be honest. My toddlers loved this. My big kids loved this. Even I had quite a lot of fun playing in it.
The baby oil makes the flour so you can mold it. So cool!
I cleaned it up after only a morning of it being out.
This is by far one of the messiest things I have ever put out for my kids (and we DO messy!). As is typical of flour, it gets everywhere! It sticks to everything! Add oil? Oh my goodness! It stuck to their clothes, feet, hair, faces. And with all its stick, it also stuck to the floors, the couch, and was all over the stairs. It was down the hall, on their chairs, and all over the toys.
I don’t think we will be doing this again any time soon.
I couldn’t keep the toddlers out of it. I would cover up the sand table, but they would take off the cover and get right back in there. They loved it so much!
Do I think you should try it? Absolutely!
I do have a few suggestions.
1) Put the cloud dough in a container with a lid. Make sure it is in a container you can take away. A tupperware style container would be a great idea.
2) If it’s a nice day outside and not too cold, do this activity outside.
3) If you can’t do this activity outside, make sure you have art smocks to put on the kids and run a bath for them before you put out the cloud dough. They might need to go straight into the bath after playing with it!
4) Whatever you do, don’t wear dark coloured clothing.
