Everyday shave cream play

My students have been asking me to pull out the shave cream so they could play with it and last week, we had a shave cream extravaganza….

You can really put anything in shave cream and it will be a fun experience. For example, we were talking about bugs on one day and so the children spread little plastic bugs out all over the table and the we covered them all up with shave cream…

And now it was time to dig in and start looking for all those bugs.  The children used tweezers and their hands to hunt for the bugs…

You really don’t have to add anything to shave cream to make it a fun experience. My students will sit and play in it for the longest time but I always like to mix it up a bit.  Another way we mixed the shave cream experience up was by adding a tray of water. It was just a small tray so the children could rinse off their bugs but the children loved how the water changed the feel of the shave cream to an even more silky or creamy texture…

I don’t think we ever did find those bugs.  I know that they are in there some where! Eventually, the children found all the bugs and we set them aside for one more adventure. Since we were already elbow deep in shave cream, I decided we might as well try at least one more thing that I had been thinking about…

So we added a bottle of clear water beads to our shave cream play.  I have a ton of waterbeads that I picked up at the beginning of the year from the Dollar Tree so this was a good chance to try a different kind of play with them…

I was only planning on adding a few water beads but the children talked me into adding the entire bottle to our creamy, watered down, now bugless shave cream play…

Talk about texture overload! The children loved it – the waterbeads added just that right touch of texture to the shave cream play. They were still smooth and soft but they were bumpy too.  Perhaps next time we will add colorful waterbeads to our shave cream play. The clear ones pretty much got lost inside the shave cream so you couldn’t see them but you could definitely feel them…

As fun as our shave cream play was without color, we decided to finish off our play by adding a little color. So I simply squirted out a few lines of paint on top of the shave cream so the children could mix it in…

The nice thing about shave cream play is that everything, and I mean everything, comes out much cleaner at the end of our day. The table was a bright white, the paint tubes were not tacky anymore, our bugs were now germ free, and our hands probably haven’t been this clean since the last time we played in shave cream…

So for those of you who are going to inevitably write me and tell me how some higher up authority that has no name that you can identify and probably doesn’t work in an early childhood classroom and doesn’t trust early childhood teachers to handle shave cream responsibly and thinks that the risks are greater then the benefits and thinks that all kids will just eat it has told you through some sort of written policy rather than walking in your classroom and observing the benefits that you can’t use shave cream in your classroom, please accept my sincerest apology for sharing the fun we had today. Since my kids do have a say as to what goes on in my classroom, we enjoyed our shave cream extravaganza!

Okay, perhaps the paragraph above wasn’t polite but I get the same questions or the same push back every time I write about shave cream that it worries me and exhausts me so please don’t write me and tell me that you can’t use it. Write whoever is telling you that rule and invite them to come into your classroom and observe the children at play with shave cream and then while they are standing there – offer them a handful of shave cream too and invite them to join in and play. Who knows, they might just have second thoughts!

At the end of the day, the children helped clean up the tables and they rinsed off their hands and even the water beads rinsed off beautifully through a strainer. I put the water beads back into the jar (they are now cleaner then ever) for another day…

Deborah J Stewart

Deborah J Stewart

Every time I think I know everything I need to know about teaching young children, God says, "Hold on a minute!" and gives me a new challenge.

Let me tell ya...

With each new challenge that you overcome, you will find yourself better equipped and more passionate about teaching young children.

God didn't call wimps to lead, teach, or care for His children. Nope, he has high expectations, so get ready. You will have to give your very best but after teaching for over 30 years, I can tell you that it is a wonderful and rewarding journey.

Whenever your calling feels hard, just remember, 'He who began a good work in you (and in the children you serve) will be faithful to complete it.'

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