Would you like to make a small world sensory bin for your preschool dinosaur theme? Make this oozy lava slime with just 3 ingredients (plus water). Your child will love squishing her fingers in the slime and using her imagination to rescue her dinosaur toys from the lava flow.
To make my lava slime, I followed this recipe from Little Bins For Little Hands. For one batch of slime, you will need:
- ½ cup Elmer’s washable white glue
- ½ cup water
- liquid watercolors or food coloring (red/orange/yellow)
- ¼ cup liquid starch, plus extra as needed (I used Stay-Flo)
To make your slime, you will whisk together the glue and water in a large bowl until well blended. Add the coloring of your choice. Keep adding food coloring or liquid watercolor until you get the depth of color you want.
Once the color is evenly distributed, you will pour in your liquid starch. Stir until most of the liquid is gone. This will happen very quickly. If you find that there is still liquid hanging around your bowl, you can add more liquid starch at this time. Your slime will look stringy and clumpy at this point. Knead the slime with your hands until it forms a smooth consistency.
Now you are ready to make your prehistoric lava slime dinosaur scene! When using a large container like I did, you will need three batches of slime to fully coat the bottom. I wanted a multi-colored swirly effect, so I made three separate batches of red, orange, and yellow. But this is not necessary! For simplicity, I recommend just using one orangey-red color. If you go with one solid color, just pour it in. If you want a swirly effect like mine, you should start by pouring in your red slime first, covering the entire bottom of the container.
Next, you will pick up clumps of orange and yellow slime with your fingers and place the blobs on top of the red slime in scattered locations. Use a fork to pull the colors through the red slime.
Try to make it look like flowing rivers of lava. This does NOT have to be perfect. As you will soon see, the colors will blend as time passes, so don’t stress about making it look realistic now.
Once my lava slime was all set and swirled to my liking, I created the dinosaur scene. I used a combination of large and small dinosaurs, pairing up the “mamas” with their “babies”. I placed some clean rocks around the bin and stood the “babies” atop the rocks.
Because I set up this sensory bin the night before, the colors had blended by the following morning while still maintaining a cool swirling effect.
As you can see, my children (ages 2, 4, and 5) loved making the slime stretch. They alternated between burying their dinosaurs in slime and then rescuing them from disaster.
Rawr!