Unplug Your Kids: Green

If you’ve been reading along this week, you’ll know that my kids are both sick - BabyGirl with an ear infection that is clearing up, and JediBoy with a sinus infection that is not. So we did just one simple Unplug Your Kids project this week on the theme of green. We made plaster squishy bags (I’m sure other people have a better name for them than that!) with blue and yellow powdered tempera added to make them turn GREEN.

We set out our box of plaster, the blue and yellow powdered tempera, two different sizes of scoops, a pitcher of cold water and four zip-top bags. We did this project on our porch because although squishy bags are usually well-contained, they do have the potential to be spectacularly messy!

JediBoy measured a cup of plaster and about a tablespoon of each color paint powder into a bag. (I made a second bag for BabyGirl, and later a third set for myself). We added about 2/3 cup of cold water. Some recipes for this project suggest equal parts plaster to water, which we find is a little too runny, and others suggest two parts plaster to one part water, which we find is a little too hard to mix. So I try to find a happy medium. After the water was added, we squeezed out the air and zipped the bag shut, then put that bag in a second one, purely to contain the mess.

Then came the fun part! The kids and I squished and squeezed and mixed and mashed the plaster in the bags, trading them and tossing them back and forth. It was fun to see the plaster and water work together, and then to see the blue and yellow paint blending into green. We squeezed and squished until the kids were tired of it - the plaster hadn’t quite set yet, but it was starting to harden.

When we were done, the bags looked like the one above. What a mess! BabyGirl’s mixture in particular was runny and JediBoy’s was stiff, which is what prompted me to mix up a third bag to see if I could find a better proportion. We let them all dry for a day - probably much longer than we needed to - and then unwrapped them. They all had flaky parts where the extra plaster had coated the insides of the bags, but we got three nice lumpy sculptures out in the end.

Here are the three sculptures we wound up with. The big, smooth and pointy one was BabyGirl’s, which had more water than the other mixtures. The round one on top was JediBoy’s, which had less water and wound up being so hard that parts of the bag stayed stuck inside the creases and we had to cut it away. The last one, which defies description, was our third try, which is also seen below.

I love the crazy shapes and JediBoy liked looking at them - like clouds - to see what shapes we could see in them.  The plaster is pleasantly smooth and cool to touch, and we wound up with three different shades of green.  It was quick and easy but always fun.