On our summer list - shaving cream colors

This concept is pretty common among preschool programs, but both my girls love this activity so much that they both requested it be added to our summer activity list.  And it's extremely inexpensive fun.  We picked up dollar store shaving cream cans, one for each girl. But one for the both would've been plenty!  And then we used cookie sheets and food coloring from the cupboard.

This is pretty simple.  Shake. Spray. Play.

And I totally let the girls take the lead here.  We just plaid in the white cream for awhile.  We talked about how it expands as it is being sprayed from the can.  How it feels, etc. 

I was especially proud of Little Miss Creative who used the cookie sheet and cream as a magna doodle of sorts.  Here she shows her family portrait. :)

Next we decided it was time to add food coloring.  Of course we stock regular colors and the neon colors.  Now if only they made more colors...

E loved dripping EVERY color on her tray, but realized later that may not have been the best choice as it made an icky poo green we could't fade out or change. But it sure looks cool here!

O chose to add her colors slowly.  At first picking her two favs, pink and purple.  (my girly girl!) and added more colors as we added more cream. This made for a cool rainbow affect.  And she really enjoyed when we added the spatulas and other utinsels.

We also added clear water beads to see what they would do.  But I think there was to much cream at this point and they sank right to the bottom of the pile.  E used hers to pretend it was buried treasure, but it was only found once as the pile was to big and the colors were to dark to find a clear softish marble.

Of course Mom had to make a rainbow pile of mooshy cream too! E wanted to know what would happen to the shaving cream if we baked it.  I honestly did not know. So of course we fired up the oven.  (I am blessed with a double oven, so the smaller one only takes minutes to heat up) We set it to 350 and "baked" our creations for about 2-3 minutes. 

Here's the cream after baking.  It's hard to explain what happened to it.  It was very clean smelling (like the original shaving cream but much lighter and airy) and it "sparkled".  It didn't seem to change size, but I suspect it would have had we left it in longer.  The girls were surprised that the cream was not at all hot like we all thought it would be.  But again, with longer time, who knows.  There are so  many things you can do with shaving cream, so thankfully we have some more for next time!