Five Faves: A Week of Dough and Goo

There are a ton of recipes out there for kids these days.  Play dough recipes and ones for different kinds of fun slime and goo.  The problem is that many of them don't make a very good product.
I've put together a list of 5 excellent recipes.
I've created these "Five Faves" posts so that you can do one project each week day!  These posts are particularly good for school vacation weeks.  Use them however you wish
and
Have Fun!

A Cure For Mean Words: Warm Fuzzies and Cold Pricklies

If you call a kid out for insulting another they will often say either that they were just kidding or that they didn't say anything.  The insults tend to be used at just the right moment when they are closer to the victim then you are... and they say it just loud enough for the victim to hear it but not you.  This makes addressing the issue difficult at times.

On top of that, kids often don't truly understand what it feels like to be at the wrong end of an insult.  They do, however, know that when they insult another child that they get attention (and power) from it.

Do you remember as a child laughing at that moment that one kid called another a name, even though you knew how wrong it was.  It is similar to when a child sees an adult get hurt and laughs.  It is almost uncontrollable, like a nerve reaction.  No matter how uncontrollable the audience's reaction is... what it does is feeds the ego of the name caller and results in more of the same.

*  *  *  *  *

I remember hearing a story at overnight camp about "Warm Fuzzies" but that wasn't the first thing I thought of when I had a class of five year olds saying not very nice things to each other.

Generally speaking my group had been quite nice to each other but they had recently hit a rough patch and I wanted some new ideas.

I consulted with my coworker who had been working with kids for far longer than I had, and was always full of good ideas.

Here's what she said to do?  Make a "cold prickly" and a "warm fuzzy."  I asked her about it and she explained what that meant.