Quick, Easy & Cheap Christmas Messy Play Ideas!

With baby/children classes coming to a close for the Christmas break, and this awful weather we are having, alot of you may be wondering how we are able to keep our little bundles of joy occupied? For those that love a bit of messy play and mark making, here are some super simple Christmas messy play ideas that you may want to try! These ideas take little to no preparation, and are very cheap (which is what we need this time of year when all our pennies go to Santa!)

Porridge Oats! On this tray, we simply sprinkled a bag of porridge oats on the tray (you can use smart price bag which is less than £1). We then purchased a blow up reindeer from the pound shop, which set the tray off just nicely! Why not team it up with little pots or envelopes, and make exciting reindeer dust for your little ones to sprinkle in the garden on Christmas eve? How exciting!

Another easy idea, which children absolute LOVE, is a tray of flour! Yes thats right, a bag of flour! Its surprising how much fun little ones can have in the flour. Once again, this set up will cost less than £1. You can get little ones to use their fingers to mark make in the flour, or can use paintbrushes or little scraper tools if you have any. I can guarantee they will love it so much! If you have any old baubles lying around, or some pine corns etc, these are also a great addition to make the tray more festive!

This other popular idea includes a little bit of preparation, but very little. If you take a bag of spaghetti pasta (less than £1 in most stores), and cook this. Once drained, add a slight bit of cooking oil (this stops it sticking when playing with it ). You can leave the pasta like this, or feel free to add a little bit of food colouring (liquid food colouring is usually 97p in asda for a small bottle!). On this particular set up, we used green food colouring and 1 pack of spaghetti pasta. We then mixed the colour in, and set it out in a triangle shape on tray. Super easy (we then added super yummy rainbow drops for the bottom of tree). You can use the spaghetti pasta same day, or refrigerate over night.

For those that love cereal, this ones great fun! We used cocopops and ricecrispies for one, and cornflakes cocopops and weetabix for the other. Once again, no preparation for this tray. You can pop the cereal onto the tray, or can use the below two photos for an idea to design a festive tray with the cereal. We done rudolph and a house, these were a hit!

IF YOU TRY ANY OF THESE CHRISTMAS MESSY PLAY IDEAS, MAKE SURE TO TAG US. WE WOULD LOVE TO SEE! @littlelearnersuk

Most of all, have fun! Enjoy the time cosying up on these winter, cold days, having lots of messy fun with your little ones, while we all get excited and wait for santa to arrive!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!