Water on a dry surface like concrete or wood is the CLEANEST, messy play experience you'll ever have. Unless it's raining - there's no excuse not to do this activity as its so easy to set up and requires little to no clean up because he water just dries! Younger children can explore making a mark with the water, toddlers can practice using tools to make a mark, older children can practice drawing letters and shapes. The possibilities are endless.

HOW: you just need water and a dry surface. I added a paintbrush and a squirty bottle of water (just an empty washing up liquid bottle) and I also put some ice and soap to the water because WHY NOT?! it was hot and I thought ice would add a fun sensory element, and bubbles never hurt anyone.

I showed August how to paint on the concrete using the paintbrush but then just let him do whatever he fancied. There was a lot of splashing!!!

LANGUAGE
Can you hear in that last video how I'm using the word 'splatter' a lot? That's a word that's typically rarely used and that I knew he'd never heard before. I taught it by using it to describe the water movement every time we splashed it. The more you repeat, the more likely they are to imitate and then learn that word. Remember no language is just in there waiting to come out, you have to teach all these weird and wonderful words!!! I also used the paintbrush to draw some familiar things like a cats face so that I could feed in more varied language.

Watch the fun here