Chasing Cheerios

Friday, January 20, 2012

Gel Drawing Board

I made this gel drawing board for E(2) before our last vacation.  I thought it would be the perfect activity for our plane trip.  Luckily, I realized before we left on our trip that this was a terrible idea since our plane was small and unpressurized, and therefore the gel bag would explode!  Phew....glad we didn't have to learn that the hard way :)

Anyway, the gel drawing board is lots of fun and super simple to make.  It's actually the only thing that I've ever made that Elliott has really, really liked!  His brother also had fun drawing with it.  The girls like it, too, but not nearly as much as the adults in our family!

To make the gel drawing board, I filled a gallon sized ziploc bag with hair gel, food coloring, and glitter.  I cut a foam core board the same size as the ziploc bag.  I taped the bag to the foam core board using zebra print duct tape.





I put a piece of clear contact on the back, so that it would work as a dry erase board.





This is a great activity for the car, and I'm planning to make some smaller ones in different colors for the girls to use in the car.  Fun stuff!

9 comments:

  1. this is so cute! I never thought about using hair gel. We make little shaving cream baggies all the time for color mixing without alot of mess, we will most assuredly try this out this week!

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  2. GENIUS! I love it. Definitely going to give it a try!

    Saw this on Pinterest and had to come follow the link! Love the name of your blog!

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  3. What a great idea! This week we made sensory bags for our Spanish/ASL class that had silverware and 1/3 cup pudding in gallon sized bags that were taped closed. (forks, knives, spoons, etc were the vocab for the day). I love how you put it on a board though, I'm going to try that out for next week!

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  4. great idea, but i don't think you'd be allowed through airport security with it, as gel is a liquid...would hate for someone to have to throw it out at security

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  5. I'm sure they wouldn't have let it through airport security! Luckily, it was a private plane, so security wasn't an issue...just the fact that the plane was not pressurized :)

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  6. How much gel did you use? I am making one, and I don't want it to be so full that it is hard to draw on.

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  7. You have such fun ideas! I tried making this tonight and I think I probably used too much gel as it isn't very easy to draw and write on it. Do you know about how much gel you used?

    Thanks so much!

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  8. I made three of these between last night and this morning. I had 16 oz. bottles of hair gel from the dollar store. The first board I made, I used about 1/2 a bottle and discovered that was too much for really writing on the board well. My toddler loves it though because it made it extra squishy. I figured out that about 1/3rd of a bottle (or about 5 oz.) is about the right amount (plus I used a bit of liquid glitter glue). Hope that helps!

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