When it comes to level of messiness, this water bead and shaving cream activity is definitely up there, but I would do it time and time again for how enjoyed it was by BOTH of our kiddos.
We started to set up this activity the night prior, by soaking our water beads in one of the plastic bins that came with out FLISAT table from IKEA. We have been using this table for about two months now and really enjoy it. You can see more details on the table here.
As for the water beads, we are still have not made it through out package of 20,000 that we purchased in August of 2018 and we have done ALOT of waterbed activities since then. It doesn’t take many to fill the bin and once they are full size, they can be played with for days! Here are the beads we use (non-toxic).
The next morning, I covered all the beads with a layer of shaving cream (dollar store shaving cream worked great!). If you want to do a taste safe version of this activity, you could swap the shaving cream for whipped cream!
When I first introduced the activity to Emmy, I told her our mission was to find all the water beads hidden in the bin, rinse them off and then fill our bottle with just the clean beads.
Once little sister woke up from her nap, she joined in on the fun too!We played until all the water beads were out of the shaving cream and clean!
As you can see, it got messy! But it was totally worth it and so much fun!
