Life’s a Beach

Our Life’s A Beach Parties are always a HUGE hit at our Messy Play Sessions! With the warmer summer days ahead, it’s the perfect time for us to share some of our messy play recipes with you so that your little beach babes can enjoy all the fun of the seaside at home this summer.

How to create your own beach with cloud dough

No beach nearby? Don’t worry! You can make your very own mini beach with this quick and easy cloud dough recipe that’s great for summertime sensory play and will keep your little one happily entertained for hours.

What you’ll need

All you need to make our cloud dough recipe is 8 cups of flour and 1 cup of vegetable oil. Just pop both ingredients in a bowl and mix and knead the mixture with your fingers to create a crumbly-textured dough. Your little one will love the messy, gooey fun to be had as they help you mix it together.

Top tip: We use vegetable oil in our cloud dough recipe to make it taste-safe for little fingers, but you could replace the vegetable oil with baby oil to make your cloud dough smell lush if your little one is older.If the mixture is too dry, just add a little more oil. If it’s a gooey, sloppy mess, add a bit more flour. Keep adjusting the mixture and kneading the dough until it’s the lovely crumbly texture that you’re aiming for.

Time to play

Lots of summer fun can now be had playing with the dough – it’s great for creating a seaside beach scene for imaginative play. Just pour the cloud dough in a tray and add some spades, buckets, shapes and toys for a fun summertime adventure!

Top tip: When your little one has finished playing, store your cloud dough in an air-tight container ready for another day. It will last for months.

Make a biscuit beach

This is an alternative beach recipe to use if your little one is still a babe, it makes the perfect pretend beach for summer fun for babies from 6 months plus.

What you’ll need

Digestive biscuits. That’s it! They’re the perfect sandy colour, and all you have to do is crush them up. You don’t even need a flashy food processor to crush them. Just pop them in a plastic ziplock bag, grab a rolling pin and bash, smash and break them up until they crumble into the perfect texture for a sandy beach.

Time to play

Just pour the crushed biscuits in a tray to make a mini beach – you could even pour them onto your babies high chair tray. This is a great sensory play activity which stimulates your baby’s sense of touch. They will LOVE getting messy and feeling the sandy, crumbly biscuit mixture in their hands as they play!

It’s entirely safe for them to eat too, so you don’t need to worry if they put their messy little fingers in their mouth. It will keep them entertained long enough for you to take a much-needed breather and have a quick cuppa. Win-win!

Sand foam

If your little one enjoys playing with slime or gloop, they will LOVE playing with sand foam. Our sand foam recipe is so foamy, slimy and grainy to handle – it’s easy to make too! Get ready for lots of foamy, sandy messy fun!

What you’ll need

All you need to make our messy sand foam recipe is just 2 ingredients! Roughly 3 cups of play sand and a can of shaving foam. It’s so simple!

Time to play

Just pour the play sand into a large bowl or tray, then add the shaving foam a bit at a time, mixing and adjusting the mixture until you’re happy with the texture.

Once the sand foam is ready, the real fun can begin. Get your little one to dig their hands right in and slop it all about and talk to them about how the foamy, sandy mixture feels on their fingers. Dig your hands in too and join in the messy, foamy fun!

Perhaps get some dinosaurs out and create a sand dinosaur beach land and watch them get lost in creative play as they enjoy their sandy adventure.

Lots of messy, slimy, foamy, sandy fun to be had by everyone!

If you and your little one enjoyed the activities in this blog post, you’d love our Mess Box! We have Rumble in the Jungle, Green Fingers and Galactic Mess to name a few. Join our Mess Box Club  on Facebook to check out the fun we have.  Order your box today at  our shop today.

Why not come along to one of our Messy Play Sessions? All you need to do is come along and mess around and leave the cleaning up to us! What’s not to love? Click here to search for a messy play session near you.

We look forward to sharing more of our favourite messy play activities with you on the Mess Around blog next month. Subscribe here to be sure not to miss out on the messy fun!  😊