Snow Tub Bath Time Activity

How sprinkling a little flour can make a great activity.

And there you have it… a photo of the mother of all toddler activities (at least according to my favorite Busy Toddler test subjects). This is Snow Tub.

I love bath tub activities. I like to think of the bath tub as a perfect porcelain activity center. It’s easy clean up near water. It wipes up. The kids stay contained. And, in my humble opinion, day time bath time is an unexpected piece of fun that always catches toddlers and babies off guard.

USUALLY, bath tub activities involve water. But not this one. This toddler activity is of a different sensory variety.

Snow Tub is just that simple: a silly sensory activity with flour.

We love playing with flour. It’s one of my favorite sensory materials. But I wanted to go large scale with our flour play and I wanted it to be an activity that both my toddler (2.5) and my baby (11 months) could do together (read between the lines: I needed a break from everyone).

I got both kids into the tub, gave my stern Mom lecture on “thou shalt not turn on water”, and started dumping in flour.

The kids went wild. I probably dropped in 3 cups of flour for them to play. I definitely dumped flour right onto them and the giggles were worth the flour hair.

Materials:
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• flour
• toys
• kids (wink wink)

It was a magical activity, truly magical.

I added in a bunch of toys – cups and cars and even a few animals – to add to our snow tub. It felt like the kids could have played in here all day. Actually, “pro-tip”: I kept adding more flour at random intervals and the excitement of that kept getting them reengaged in the activity.

This lasted forever!!

Oh and they basically did last all day playing in Snow Tub. Well, by toddler activity standards. The baby (11 months) played for 20 minutes. TWENTY. MINUTES. And the 2.5 year old lasted 40. FORTY MINUTES.

See what I mean? Basically all day. I can’t ask for much more with an activity. When you add in the set up and the clean up, we had something to do for an hour. Now that’s helping the get to nap time cause.

This kind of sensory play with flour is so good for kids.

It gives them a chance to imagine, create and explore a new texture in a fun and interesting environment. I also loved that my kids could play this together. The baby definitely ate her body weight in flour, but I’m fine with that. She’s a second born (wink).

The low down on clean up

Let’s talk about how to clean this up WITHOUT accidentally making gravy in your tub. DO NOT just turn on the facet to rinse this. A small broom and dust pan is really the best and will keep the flour from clogging your drain.

Sweep and scoop out as much as possible, then hit it with your vacuum. Finally, just rinse out the tub or wait for official bath time to do that part. I know that sounds like a lot but the kids helped and it was cleaned in about 7 minutes.

And tips on getting the kids clean…

We’ve done this a handful of times since our first go around so we’ve got the clean up down. The toys stay in for the next bath and that takes care of them. For kid clean up, I’ve done this two ways. Once, I plopped them in the shower and the other time, I put them in our other tub. If I didn’t have those options, they would have gone into the kitchen sink and rinsed them off there.

All told, this is one of the cutest and most fun toddler activities you will ever see. It’s just too fun to play with “snow” in the tub and all the imagination and play that it comes with. Two toddler thumbs up on this sensory activity.

Would your kids like a snow tub? Are you game to try?