Messy Play Ideas for Babies

Messy play is an open-ended way of exploration that allows babies and children to take the lead and independently explore different textures and materials through various senses.

Messy play provides a wealth of benefits for babies and helps to enhance their natural curiosity about the world, increase imagination and encourage exploration. Getting messy also promotes the development of motor skills and is great for promoting a sense of independence and control in babies.

In this blog, we cover the best messy play ideas for babies. We go over easy-to-do messy play activities including oatmeal sensory bins, finger painting, dry pasta sensory bins, edible chocolate mud and much more!

8 Messy Play Ideas For Babies You Need To Try Out Today

1. Porridge Sensory Bins

You’ll need the following:

• Storage container/tray
• Porridge oats
• Toys
• Measuring instruments (optional)

For this just fill a shallow container with cooked and cooled porridge and add in different toys and resources, Then let your children explore and play with the porridge and toys.

Benefits:

• Improve motor skills by manipulating oatmeal and toys
• Introduce children to new textures to enhance sensory development
• Can be a great way to introduce concepts of measuring
• Improve fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination through pouring and filling

2. Finger Painting

You’ll need the following:

• Non-toxic / finger paint
• Shallow container/tray
• Black or white paper

For this, just mix a small amount of no-toxic paint with a little bit of water and let your baby use their fingers to paint and mark making.

If your children tend to put things in their mouths, you can substitute paint for yoghurt and a bit of food dye which will provide a more pleasant gustation experience. In addition to this using yoghurt and food dye creates super vibrant that your children will be in awe of!

Benefits:

• Improve hand-eye coordination and grip strength through painting
• Multisensory experience - children can feel the textures of the paint, see the vibrant colours, and smell the paint.
• Allows children to explore colour mixing
• Open-ended and allows them to use their imagination to paint whatever they want
• Improves motor skills through painting

3. Jelly Sensory Bin

You’ll need the following:

• Flavoured jelly
• Shallow container/tray
• Toys

For this activity just mix a package of flavoured jelly with boiling water and let it cool to room temperature. Then pour it into a shallow container and add different toys such as wooden letters or dinosaurs. Place the jelly in the refrigerator for several hours until it firms up. Then let your children dig in and explore!

Benefits:

• Great for children who are prone to putting things in their mouths during messy play.
• Multisensory experience - children can feel the textures of jelly, taste the jelly, smell the jelly and hear the jelly squelch as they squish it.
• Open-ended - children can add anything to their jelly sensory bin and make it personalised, there are no rules for playing with jelly!

4. Shaving Cream Colour Mixing Bags

You’ll need the following:

• Shaving cream
• Food colouring
• Resealable bags.
• Tempera paint
• Tape

To make these squishy bags all you have to do is add tempera paint to the corners of the sealable bags, then add shaving cream to the bag. When you do this ensure that you push the foam as far into the bottom of the bag as possible. This ensures that the bag doesn’t overfill and split as your child plays with it. Finally, as an extra precaution add some duct tape to the top of the bag.

You can even replace the shaving cream with glue, paint, hair gel, baby oils and flour and water mixtures. Substituting different materials for others allows your children to experience unique and different textures!

Benefits:

• Open-ended - children can mix other resources into their mixing bags to create different consistencies or colours.
• Improves hand-eye coordination and motor skills as children squish these bags to create new colours
• Helps children understand colours by watching how different colours mix and interact with each other to form new colours.
• Teaches children about colour mixing

5. Dry Pasta Sensory Bin

You’ll need the following:

• Uncooked pasta
• Plastic bottle with lids (varying in size)
• Measuring cups, scoops, tweezers
• Container/tray

This is a great open-ended messy play activity for children to engage in. Just fill a container with uncooked pasta and let your children decide what to do with the plastic bottles, measuring cups and scoops. Watch as your children fill up plastic bottles with dry pasta, shake them around, empty them out and fill them back up again! As they do this they become more acquainted with the various sounds and textures that dry pasta makes.

Benefits:

• Multisensory - explore the sense of sound by shaking bottles of pasta or sense of touch by feeling the dry pasta with their hands 
• Improve motor skills - as children pour the pasta into bottles and pick up pasta pieces with spoons and tweezers
• Can be a quiet activity to help children calm down and learn to play independently
• Great group activity to teach children to take turns and share

6. Flour Sensory Bin

You’ll need the following:

• Flour
• Container/tray
• Toys
• Kitchen utensils - scoops, large bowls, ice cube trays
• Oil (optional)

For this activity just fill a container and tray with flour and add in toys and various kitchen utensils. Let your children dig up toys from the flour or measure and pour flour over their toys with various kitchen utensils and measuring instruments.

With a flour sensory bin, the possibilities are endless for children. Children can scoop flour up, fill different-sized bowls or ice cube trays, doodle into the flour to create different shapes and letters and much more!

Looking to take your flour sensory bin to the next level? Simply add oil to your flour bin to create cloud dough. For this, you can use baby oil or cooking oil. Adding oil to the mixture creates a dough that is silky and easily moulded but still crumbly in texture. This is great for children who don’t enjoy having a sticky mess on their hands after sensory play activities. Another benefit of cloud dough is it is much easier to clean up after your children are finished playing.

Benefits:

• Develop hand-eye coordination through scooping, measuring and doodling flour
• Open-ended - endless possibilities for children to manipulate flour
• Great group play activity to teach children to take turns and share
• Great way to expose your children to different tactile experiences

7. Shaving Cream Sensory Bins

You’ll need the following:

• Shallow container/tray
• Shaving cream (or whipped cream)
• Toys
• Water
• Spoons and whisks (optional)

For this just simply add shaving cream into a shallow container and drop a few drops of different coloured food dye. Adjust the consistency of the shaving cream by adding a bit of water to make it runnier for a different sensory experience. Then let your children explore with their hands or mix with spoons or whisks and create all the colours of the rainbow. You can even add different toys into the mixture and have children search for them in the bubbly foam.

Benefits:

• Improve logical thinking - children will question how adding more shaving cream or water will affect the texture or how they can create certain colours by adding other food colourings.
• Improve motor skills and creativity - as children build 3D shapes with the saving foam and mix colours to create new colours.
• Great group activity, children can communicate with each other and attempt to create structures together.
• An open-ended activity, children can add different toys and colours to the foamy mixture

8. Glitter Sensory Bottles

You’ll need the following:

• Plastic bottle
• Corn syrup or Oil
• Water
• Food colouring
• Glitter

Glitter sensory bottles are super easy to make. Just squeeze some corn syrup into an empty bottle and fill it to one-third of the bottle, you can also use oil for this step. Then add warm water until it's three-quarters full and add in some food colouring and glitter. Then just close the lid and mix together the ingredients.

Benefits:

• Open-ended - gives children the opportunity to any resources they want into the bottle to create different visual sensory experiences. 
• Teaching aid for science - can be used to teach concepts such as viscosity and density 
• Improve motor skills - as children pouring in liquids into the bottles to make their glitter bottles. Then shake the bottles up to mix them up altogether. 
• Calming - children will love shaking and watching how the glitter floats inside the glitter sensory bottles.

9. Edible Chocolate Mud

You’ll need the following:

• Flour
• Cocoa powder
• Vegetable oil
• Water
• Container/tray

To create chocolate mud, place the cocoa powder in a bowl. Then add flour and add oil slowly little by little until it reaches the desired consistency. Then spread the edible mud on a tray or sensory bin and let your children play with it freely! Watch as they add their favourite toys into the mix and pretend they are stuck in the mud! Chocolate mud is great for pretend construction play with small toys or role-play with pig toys and pretending they are stuck in the mud!

Note: uncooked flour can have bacteria, if your child is still putting things in their mouth then as a precaution cook the flour in a tray at 350 degrees for 15 minutes and let it cool down before doing this activity.

Benefits:

• Edible so for children who are prone to putting things in their mouth, this is a suitable and safe activity.
• Great for collaborative small-world play, allows children to practice language skills by talking with their friends as they role-play
• Provides a multi-sensory experience, children can see the mud getting stuck on their toys, smell the chocolatey scent and feel how sticky it gets on their hands. This helps them understand more about the world around them.