A New Activity

Today, our preschool teacher had to take the day off, and asked me if I could be in charge of teaching preschool. It was a cooler day today (a great break from the hot, hot weather we've been having) and it was supposed to rain in the afternoon. I thought it would be a great idea to make some homemade sidewalk paint (using cornstarch, water, and food coloring) and have the children paint the ground in the backyard. Something went awry-- either the powder I used wasn't cornstarch (the packaging was in Chinese) or we used way too much of it. Anyway, it turned out to be a strange consistency... we couldn't quite decide what it was... until someone pointed out that it was goop! Even though it wasn't what we had planned, we decided to go ahead and let the kids have some fun with it anyway.

Smocked up and ready to go:

The kids were hesitant at first and would only touch it with a paintbrush:

But they soon realized it was much more fun with their hands! Have you ever played with this stuff? Pick it up and squeeze it--it's hard and crumbly. Hold it loosely with your fingers-- it turns back to liquid and oozes through!

Clean-up was easy (the smocks helped) and the kids were all exclaiming, "好玩儿！" (This is fun!) The aftermath-- a class full of happy kids and only one broken paintbrush. I think we'll do this again soon!

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Post and photography by our intern, Jess