A Multi-sensory Experience: Clean Mud

Clean mud is a mulit-step multi-sensory experience that everyone must try!

Take about 6 bars of white soap.  We started with Ivory and switched to Dove.  Grate the soap with cheese graters until it is in very small pieces.  We used the large side of the graters.  We grate it right into our sensory table.  

We have graters that are designated just for soap and crayons at our school.  As these are sharp, we have the children wear a glove on the hand holding the soap to avoid any nicks with the grater.

This took a couple of days with different children taking turns grating.  Some loved it and grated every day, others took one turn and were done...and some avoided this part. 

The soap smell becomes very strong during this part, so if that might bother some of your students, you can choose a soap with less scent.     

Once the soap has been grated all up, we move on to the toilet paper.  We ripped up about four rolls of toilet paper into teeny tiny pieces and added that to the soap. We hung ours from a rod above the sensory table to allow the children independent access to the toilet paper as they were ripping it.  This part took another couple of days.

You then have a fluffy, powdery, clean smelling
bunch of stuff in your sensory table.  Make sure the children take a look at it at this point for comparison later.

Then we added warm water a little at a time and watched what happened.

The fluffiness went down as more water was added.

As we mixed it up with our hands we could feel it changing. The dryness became moist, the fluffiness became smooth and sticky.

We added about 6 small pitchers of warm water, but this is purely preference and trial and error.  There is no "wrong" way to do it...after all, its the process that counts.

We noticed that a full sensory table full of material disappeared leaving what seemed like a small amount of stuff behind.

Until we started playing with it...
and it got fluffier....
and fluffier...
and fluffier once again.

It feels really good on your hands, especially that first day when it is warm. The children are using their senses of touch, sight and smell together with this experience. 

Yep! That good!

We used it for another day after that and now we will play with what we saved in our outdoor mud kitchen.
Give it a try!