That doesn’t mean that all seventeen play with Moon Sand.
A few are college-age and one is brand new.
The best time to make Moon Sand is
when only a few are on hand.
Our grandchildren usually remind us of things they love to do well before they come to visit. It may seem that I have run out of original ideas but not so. I promised the Moon Sand and even found a variation of last year’s recipe to keep things interesting.
Grandpa brought the big white flour bucket upstairs from the food storage room. He opened it with the special yellow handle. I brought out my 4 cup measuring bowl and scooped 8 cups into each bin. For those of you who are struggling with math, that means I filled the 4-cup bowl two times for each child.
(The bins were 97 cents at Wal-Mart and I use them for everything. Well, not everything but many things.)
Prior to the mixing, we put a couple of pieces of sidewalk chalk into several ziploc bags and got out the hammers. Each child chose a color of chalk that he or she liked, zipped up the bag and hammered the chalk until it turned into powder.
The kids poured the chalk powder into the flour and then squirted an entire bottle of Wal-Mart-brand baby oil into the mixture.
The work began.
Their fingers slid through the soft and smelly mixture and their hands squeezed and squeezed until everything was smooth.
They made hardly a sound except:
YAY ! MOON SAND.
I have read that you can use vegetable oil
instead of baby oil.
I have tried both. Baby Oil is the best, makes the air smell like heaven and the sand feel like silk.
(The sand is not as light using vegetable oil.)
I have also used food coloring instead of sidewalk chalk to color the sand. Food coloring is more vibrant (if you use many drops) but can be difficult to mix in and sometimes stains the hands.
These kids played for hours with little molds from the playroom and other small containers which made shapes and then put their sand into the bags they had used to pulverize their chalk.
The bins rinsed out easily with the hose.
The baby oil bottles went into the ship-building box
which contains potential parts of future boats and ships.
” You can calm things down in nothing flat with Moon Sand and Slime.
