Monkey has a serious obsession with all construction vehicles. He has an entire collection of small trucks for inside, a set of larger trucks for outside, plus another set at the cottage. Yes, he's spoiled! The outside trucks live in his sand table or in the sandbox. We also take them to the park where he sits in the sand and plays with them. Until I drag him back home. He doesn't even go on the play structure, unless he's taking one of his trucks for a ride down the slide! But I digress.
Monkey really loves playing with his smaller inside trucks, too. For the past few weeks he hasn't played with much else. He's been entertained enough just driving them around on the couch, talking them through their jobs and quoting his favourite show "Mighty Machines: Construction Trucks Go To School". But in the past few days he's been looking for stuff he can scoop and dump and move around. He tried some wooden and plastic blocks, and even the laundry! I knew I had to find something better.
Here is the perfect solution! Beans. I've seen this idea online on a lot of blogs, but I followed the instructions from here: http://www.funathomewithkids.com/2014/02/how-to-color-beans-for-play-and-art.html?m=1
(Fantastic blog, by the way, I highly recommend checking it out.)
Supplies: beans (we used navy beans), food colouring, paper towel
Last night we dyed the beans. You could just play with the beans when they're white, but who doesn't love a little bit of rainbow? I bought eight bags of beans so we chose eight colours and got to work. The instructions on the blog I read were to use 15-20 drops of food coloring for each cup of beans. The bags I bought were just under two cups each so we used 30 drops of food colouring in each bag. Since we were using the whole bag, we just dropped the food colouring right into the bag and shook the beans in the bag. But if you wanted to make less, you could use ziploc bags.
Monkey's Daddy did all the shaking here. He did it for about 30 seconds per bag. It wasn't as messy as I thought it was going to be, although he did get some food colouring on his hands.
We used a combination of original and neon colours. The bottom two piles in the picture below are colours we made by mixing. We did it by dropping both colours into the bag, no need to mix the colours first. These ones needed to be shaken a little bit longer. The red (on the left side) wasn't very dark at first and looked too much like the pink (on the right side) so my husband dumped them back in the bag and added 30 more drops of red. It made a big difference which you can see in the pictures more towards the end.
After we finished coating the beans with the food colouring, we laid them out to dry overnight.
We checked before we went to bed and they were not dry - the food colouring came off on our hands. But by the morning they were good to go!
I arranged the beans into a beautiful rainbow in the long, shallow container I bought for this purpose.
Doesn't it look so inviting!? I realize this is the one and only time they will be like this which breaks my perfectionist heart, but I didn't make them for me so it's not important.
I put some of Monkey's trucks in the beans so it would be ready and waiting for him when he woke up.
Well he's been at this for about three hours now, stopping only to eat (when forced) and go to the bathroom (also when forced).
The food colouring won't come off on his hands, unless they are wet. Even then, it comes off with a good bath.
The beans should last for a while (years) as long as they are stored in an air tight container. I'm not sure I'll be able to convince Monkey to use any other toys in the beans right now, but maybe eventually we could put his farm toys in, or the measuring cups and spoons, etc. Lots of ways to play!
Mar
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