Spring Water Table Ideas
It is Spring in Annapolis which means our water table is out! We’ve had this water table for four years now - it was given to my daughter on her first birthday. In the late Fall we put it away for Winter and then when the weather starts to warm up, we bring it out. I love this toy so much because there are a million different ways to play with it. Here are the four things we are putting in the water table right now, in order of messiness:
Beads, string and pipe cleaners
Flowers and water
Puffballs and water
Shaving cream
Beads, string and pipe cleaners
This is a great fine-motor activity that involves very little mess. I keep our pony beads, string and pipe cleaners in a cookie tin in a closet. When we want to use them, I just open the cookie tin and dump them all into the water table. The girls love making bracelets and necklaces! This is a great use for your water table if the Spring weather is still a bit too chilly for water. The girls can also clean up this activity independently!
Flowers and water
Spring is in the air and flowers are everywhere! It has been raining for days so flower petals are literally everywhere - all over the ground! I have a rule with my kids about picking flowers, “Don’t touch if it’s planted on-purpose.” This means that usually our rose bushes and azalea bushes are off-limits for picking. But after a big Spring rain, rose petals and azalea flowers are all over the ground! I filled the water table while the girls each took a cup to collect flowers and petals from around the yard. They loved making flower cupcakes by pouring the petals and water into a cupcake tin. We used some color-identification with my two-year-old during this as well since she had added a few yellow dandelions to the pink petal soup.
Puffballs and water
Puffballs are one of my favorite open-ended materials! Get them wet and it brings the play a step further. The girls loved the texture of the wet puffballs and had so much fun squeezing the water out of them. I recommend using tongs with this activity! The balls are easy to grab with the tongs and the kids really enjoyed using a utensil they see me use in the kitchen. I put this on the messier side because the cleanup is a bit harder than when using a natural material - you’ll have to squeeze the puffballs out and lay them out to dry when you’re done.
Shaving cream
Saved the messiest for last in this list! When I taught preschool, I had lots of coworkers who refused to use super messy materials like shaving cream and glitter because they are just so hard to clean up. I totally feel that indoors, and that’s one of the best parts of playing outside! Shaving cream is a sensory explosion. It smells strongly, it feels foamy, it sticks to everything. Just know what you’re getting into with this activity - it will get messy very fast. My two-year-old had it in her hair in less than a minute. My five-year-old loves clothes so she opted to take her dress off after a few minutes. Within 30 minutes, they were both covered head-to-toe in shaving cream and we were all laughing uncontrollably. The JOY this brings is so worth the mess. Do this on a warm day and you can hose the kids off at the end.
