Turning Failed Bath Crayons into Fun!

I have been really excited about making bath crayons for Zel. I looked up several recipes and it seemed pretty straightforward. Grated bar soap, warm water, and food coloring...how could I mess this up? After the crayons had been drying for over 24 hours, I realized that something was not going as planned. I put the crayons in the freezer, but whenever I took them out they got too soft squished when I held them.



Then I saw this post on Carrots are Orange about ivory soap, which is the kind of bar soap that I used. Ivory soap has extra air in it, which makes sense that it would not get hard enough with water added to it. Now I had all these mushy bath crayons plus two extra bars of Ivory soap. So we decided to give this new sensory activity a try. The bath crayons that I made expanded while they were heating up but as soon as the microwave stopped the whole thing collapsed. I'm assuming that happened because water was added to those. Oh well, but not to worry, I still had another bar of unopened Ivory soap. Zel knew something fun was happening because I put plastic out on the floor plus some tools to explore the material. Zel was already having fun with the plastic sheet and meat tenderizer while the soap was heating up.

Once I gave him the expanded soap, he hit that over and over and over. 

Then I showed him that it turned to powder if you crumpled it with your hands. He tried to copy me and also said "snow" while he did it. His favorite thing (aside from hitting the meat tenderizer on everything!) was to squeeze it as hard as he could while grunting until his face turned red. This is how he shows off that he is strong (He does the same thing if I ask him to make a muscle).

Eventually, the whole bar had been reduced to powder. Zel and I put it all in a plastic container and saved it for another day. We also changed our clothes because we were covered in little powdered specks of soap. Was it worth the clean-up effort? I think so.