Liquid Sidewalk Chalk

I am totally in heaven this summer....and completely exhausted. All of you with more than 2 kids...you have my utmost respect. Watching 4 kids is wonderful...and exhausting. This week, I've been watching my niece, Peyton, and my nephews, Gabriel & James. They are terrific kids and thankfully, with it being summer, we've been able to do a lot of outdoor activities - which I love. Yesterday, we tried our hand at Liquid Sidewalk Chalk. This is so much fun!! My son, my nephews and my niece were all able to enjoy it - despite their wide span in ages. 

Photo from Pinterest

I, thankfully, had all of the items needed on hand - cornstarch, water and food coloring. Easy-peasy. I had Gabe help me mix the food coloring into the cornstarch/water mixture. That was a nice little bonus for him since he's the oldest and could easily get bored more quickly - having him be a part of the  chalk making made playing with it that much more enticing, I believe.

In DomesticCharm's blog, she talks about using gel food coloring as the colors would be brighter, but I did not have any gel food coloring, so I just used about 3 drops of the food coloring I did have, and the colors seemed plenty vivid to me. By the way, some of the colors were neon - hence the not as vivid, but definitely bright.

I made a double-batch of the chalk because I was pretty sure that with two 2-year-olds, there was bound to be a mess of epic proportion with spilling and tears. Thankfully, there was an epic mess - but not much spilling and no tears.

It starts...

Yes, it got messy but it all washes off very easily and there was no harm done. This made for a very fun activity.

Later on, while Cade & James were taking their naps, Peyton and Gabriel went out with the second batch of chalk that we had left and they had a blast, sans-2-year-olds, painting the rocks in our backyard.

This kept two 2-year-olds, a near 5-year-old and an 8-year-old entertained for a solid 30 minutes or more and required very little set up and almost no clean-up (other than sticking the paint brushes and muffin tins in the dishwasher). This is definitely something I will be keeping in my back pocket for future use. Hope you can enjoy it with your kiddos as well.