Messy Play Monday: Shaving Foam

This week I am posting about using shaving foam in Messy Play. This is one of the easiest messy play activities to recreate at home and actually has very little clean up involved afterwards!

We use shaving foam in our messy play for the following activities:

Sensory exploration
Like many other messy play activities the sensory experience of exploring shaving foam can provoke lots of language among small children as they begin to try to describe the textures they feel.

Mark making
As toddlers children notice there is sometimes a connection between their movements and marks that they make, for example noticing that if they wipe their finger through spilled weetabix it leaves a trail. As they get older they begin to deliberately make marks for example enjoying walking through a puddle or some mud and then looking at the tracks their footprints make or seeing their footprints in the sandpit.

When we use shaving foam as a messy play activity we are encouraging children to experiment with mark making. Once the foam is spread out it is easy for children to make lines, marks and patterns in the foam. Even more important is the ease with which they can erase those marks as this means that even children who are not confident enough to engage in more permanent mark making such as drawing on paper can take small steps by making these very temporary marks in the shaving foam.

As they grow in confidence we see children using shaving foam as a canvas for pictures and writing which begins to be intentional representations of objects, people or symbols which they are familiar with.

To recreate this activitiy...

You will need:

• A can of shaving foam. At school we use supermarket own brand shaving foam, it is cheap (currently 26p in my supermarket) and does exactly what we need it to do.
• Some sort of tray or surface to use the foam in. As you can see we generally use a black tray as the marks show up well against the white foam. 

From a parents perspective this is a great minimal mess activity, the foam wipes up easily and washes out of clothing without a problem and small amounts of it just "melt" away to nothing.