Frozen Soapy Sculptures

Build sculptures with fragrant soap and then engage in glorious sensory play

Sensory play is still exciting around here - especially when they involve lots of bright colors. To make an invitation to play even more exciting just bump up the color factor and watch the kids pounce on that kids activity. Last time we played with soap was when we made our popular sudsy goop recipe. This time we are doing something awesome with soap. Fun building activity and a sensory play idea. Materials

• Bubble Bath
• AmeriColor Food Color
• 12 Cavity Heart Pan
• Regular Muffin Pan

I purchased my bubble bath from Wal-Mart for under $3 and got plenty of soap cakes.

How to make frozen soap

• Simply pour your bubble bath soap in individual cups and add food color to it. Be sure to buy clear soap since you are going to mix colors.
• Gently swirl and mix the colors making sure there aren’t any big drops of food color sitting at the bottom of the cups. You can also directly do the color mixing in the muffin pan. But getting the color evenly spread out that way is harder.
• Before pouring the colored soap you can also insert some of your cupcake liners inside the slots if you want to make soap cakes with ridges.
• We used a variety of molds - muffin pan, heart shaped short bread pan, regular ice trays.
• Adding glitter to the soapy mixture is optional but highly recommended.

Once you pour the soapy mixture into the muffin pan, place it in the freezer. Once frozen getting the soap cakes out is not that hard. Just let the muffin pan sit out for 5 minutes and use a knife to pop off the frozen soap.

Make Frozen soap sculptures for kids

Those fragrant frozen soap is just begging to be played with, right? {We have done ice sculptures in the past }I set out all the soap in our sensory bin { which is a clear container basically}

First my 4 year was very eager to smell the soap cakes and spent some time feeling them. She also was very excited to see the bright colors and pretending these were bug eyes and was cracking up so hard. I always adore watching the little kids’ imagination take off during play.

Then she naturally started building. When we started this kids activity because of her sister’s sudden interest in freezing all kinds of things I didn’t know what they are going to do with the frozen soap. The 4 year old knew what she wanted to do with all those soap - build and make frozen soap sculptures. She started stacking them up while making up stories. Big sister also quickly jumped in and made this gorgeous frozen soap bridge Those heart molds we used turned out to be a great idea since these tiny soap hearts were perfect for playing.

More stacking and building ensued I loved that my 6 year old pointed out that these sculptures her sister was building looked very much like all the cairns we see during our hikes. We love to explore our local trails and we always see artistically stacked stones done so . There is so much science and math to it as well since balancing them is not that easy.

On to Frozen Soap Sensory Play

Before continuing be sure to read this lovely post on ” Why sensory play is important” After building stacking soap towers, the 4 year decided to engage in sensory play.

She smooshed the frozen soap and started smearing the crushed remains. The soap cakes apparently are a lot of fun to be broken into pieces and smeared around.

Once that’s done plenty of times the frozen soap cakes turn into this beautiful mush.

Thanks for reading

More super fun sensory play ideas

Want a low-mess, dry sensory bin? We have got those sensory bins as well

• Baby and toddler play ideas
• 3-5 play ideas
• Preschool Science and Math Activities