8 Shaving Cream Sensory Activities For Babies & Toddlers

ByKelly Garnett

Shaving cream is a great medium for sensory play with your babies and toddlers as it has a great and fun texture for kids to get their hands in, it is easy to clean out of clothes, and it was made to go on your skin, so it is safe to get on their hands and arms.

Some fun sensory activities to do with your kids include shaving cream paint, rainbow sensory bin, shaving cream with corn starch, frozen shaving cream, shaving cream letter, and number tracing, shaving cream pie making, shaving cream cake decorating, and more.

There are so many great sensory activities that your toddlers and babies will love and enjoy that you can do with shaving cream. 

Shaving Cream Paint

Shaving cream paint is almost guaranteed to be a great hit with your kids and even with your baby.

It is super easy to make and what is great about it is that you can choose whether you want to make a big batch of it for your kids if you want to let them paint on a large canvas like the sidewalk, or you can make a small batch for a small canvas like an A4 piece of paper.

All you need is to mix shaving cream with some food coloring, and that is it! Super easy, and you can even teach your toddler how to make it with you.

Layout a few different bowls, fill each one with however much shaving cream you want to use and add a different food coloring to each bowl.

Put a paintbrush in each bowl and invite your toddler to mix the color into the shaving cream.

And there you have it; it really is that simple. Now let your toddler, or even your baby, go crazy with the paintbrush on whatever canvas you choose.

Because shaving cream was made to go on human skin, you can even let your toddler’s finger paint with the shaving cream paint, but this would not be suitable for your baby as there’s a chance that they will try to put the shaving cream in their mouth.

Rainbow Shaving Cream Sensory Bin

A rainbow shaving cream sensory bin is a great sensory activity for your babies and toddlers.

Prepare a large tub, preferably a shallow one that will be easy for your child to reach in, in an area that you will not mind getting messy; on the lawn outside, for example.

Fill the entire tub with a full can of shaving cream, possibly even two, depending on the size of the tub.

In six different rows, add a few drops of each color of food coloring: red, yellow, orange, green, blue, and purple.

Using a fork or popsicle stick, mix each individual color into the shaving cream, maintaining each color’s row, thus creating a rainbow in the shaving cream.

Invite your child to stick their hands in the shaving cream sensory bin and play around.

They can mix up the rainbow colors together or put toys in there and try and search for them, or they could simply just mix their hands around in this cool textured foam and enjoy themselves.

Shaving Cream And Corn Starch

Mixing shaving cream and cornstarch together creates an amazingly cool product, unlike any other mixture you may have made or experienced before.

The mixture will create a mouldable, fun, squishy product that your kids can build with and form into great and crazy creations and let their minds go wild with creativity.

On top of it being super fun for your toddler and baby, this activity is really great as a sensory activity too.

It is super easy to make this mixture. All that you will need is a tub to mix everything in, preferably a large one, shaving cream, and cornstarch.

Layout the tub in an area of your house where you do not mind getting a little messy, and then evenly layout about two cups of cornstarch on the bottom of the tub.

Add the shaving cream on top of the cornstarch. Add the shaving cream until it has completely covered the cornstarch. 

Let your toddler use their hands and combine the shaving cream and cornstarch together well, and then keep adding and mixing more shaving cream and cornstarch together until you get the texture you are after.

This recipe is not a perfect science, and you can mess around with it until you find the right texture that you are after.

Try giving your kids some spades and cookie cutters and let them mess around with this fun sand-like product.

For a little extra added fun, you can add some food coloring to this fun mixture. You could even add some glitter and plastic confetti if you would like.

This will just make it a much messier experiment but also a far more fun one for your kids.

This activity will be far more fun for toddlers than it would for babies, but both will definitely enjoy it.

Frozen Shaving Cream

A frozen sensory bin is fun for many reasons, a big one being that it engages more than one of your senses at the same time.

This frozen shaving cream sensory bin is a great hit, especially during crazy hot summer days.

Here is the way that you make a frozen shaving cream sensory bin:

In a small bowl, mix together a cup of water with five to ten drops of food coloring.

Add roughly a teaspoon of glitter to the water and mix well.

You can repeat this with as many different colors as you would like; in fact, the more colors, the better.

Gather a few empty ice trays, and if you have a few different-sized ice trays, try using them all.

Pour your colorful, glittery water into the different ice trays and put them in the freezer overnight (or until they are fully frozen.)

Once the ice is frozen and ready to be popped out of the ice trays, prepare your sensory tub.

Get a large plastic tub or a large baking sheet, and fill the bottom of it with a thick layer of shaving cream.

Depending on the size of the tub, grab between three to six ice cubes of each color and throw them into the shaving cream.

And that is it, you can now invite your little one to get their hands messy and go crazy with their frozen shaving cream sensory tub!

As the ice melts, it is going to create swirls of color and glitter in the shaving cream, so from the beginning to the end, this ice is going to make your shaving cream look magical.

Shaving Cream Letter And Number Tracing

Using shaving cream to teach your kids their letters and numbers is amazing because they love getting to play with it, so they will be eager to do this activity almost every time.

Layout a small baking sheet or a large plate, and put enough shaving cream on it to cover the bottom of the plate or baking sheet.

Add a drop or two of food coloring in and mix it well so that all the shaving cream is the same color.

Put the plate down on a table and let your child sit in front of it. Then, show your child a letter one at a time, and let them trace it with their finger in the shaving cream.

For example, show them a capital letter “A” and let them copy the A into the shaving cream. Then show them a lower case “a” and let them copy it. 

Teach your child about the letter, like how it sounds and what words begin with A, and then give them a new letter

You can do this exercise with numbers too, and they usually catch on with the numbers really quickly.

If it seems like your child is getting bored, take a break, and later on resume the activity again, and if you can, try replacing the old shaving cream with new shaving cream with a new color.

Kids love learning, you just need to make it fun, and shaving cream does just that.

Shaving Cream Cake Decorating

This sensory activity with shaving cream is one of the most fun activities around. It allows for your kids to get their hands messy and let their minds get creative.

What you will need for this activity is:

  • A box
  • Shaving cream
  • A spatula
  • A whisk 
  • Food coloring (optional)
  • Pom poms
  • Pipe cleaners
  • Tissue paper torn into pieces
  • Glitter
  • Any other decorations you would like, for example, googly eyes.

This activity will definitely get messy, so try doing it in the garden or on the pavement if you can.

The point of this activity is to build and decorate a cake, the box being the cake.

Place the box on the floor and lay all of the decorations out around it who your child to choose from.

Show your child on a small section of the box how to spread the shaving cream on as the cake’s the frosting of the cake and allow them to do the rest by themself. 

The spatula really helps with this part, but using their hands will probably be more fun.

Once the shaving cream has been spread all over the box, let them use their decorations to decorate the cake however they would like to.

If there is an upcoming holiday around the corner, you could even encourage them to do a themed cake, for example, a Christmas-themed cake or a halloween themed cake.

If you would like different color options for the “frosting,” you can put shaving cream into a few separate bowls before you start the activity and add different color food coloring into each bowl and mix well. 

This way, your child can have multiple colors to add to their “cake” and make it as bright, crazy, and colorful as their heart’s desire.

Shaving Cream Pie Making

Another fun shaving cream “dessert” activity that you can do with your child is to let them make their very own shaving cream pumpkin pie.

This is a great thanksgiving activity. However, it will still be fun for your kids to do any time of the year as a fun sensory activity.

What you will need is:

  • A pie tin
  • Sand 
  • Shaving cream
  • Cinnamon (optional)
  • Orange food coloring
  • A bowl
  • A spatula 

Using some sand from your backyard and a little bit of water to get the sand slightly damp and mouldable, let your child make a “pie crust” in the pie tin.

Next, add shaving cream into a bowl and add a few drops of orange food dye to it. Use the spatula to mix it in well; the goal is to have a nice, dark orange color.

Mix in the cinnamon to give it that classic pumpkin pie smell, and allow your child to assemble their pie, using the spatula to scoop the “filling” into their pie crust.

Shaving Cream Bath Painting

Kids love getting to paint their bathtubs, and why wouldn’t they? It is a large, blank, slippery canvas that they get to have limitless fun with.

This is an incredibly easy and fun sensory activity to do with your kids that does not take a lot of preparation. 

Use the shaving cream paint recipe that you read above. Get your kids into some old clothes, or even just a diaper, and give them the different colored shaving cream paint.

This activity does get very messy, but it will allow your kids to get creative as well as enjoy some sensory play using their hands and very often their feet too.

Conclusion 

Shaving cream is an amazing medium to use for sensory play activities. It is safe to go on your skin, and if you add some food coloring to it, it creates a safe alternative to paints that may end up hurting your kids if it ends up on their skin.

You can use shaving cream as a learning tool that your kids will love or as a fake food for your kids to “bake” or decorate with.

No matter what activity you use it for, shaving cream is great for sensory play, and there are so many good ways for you and your child to have fun with it.

References 

I am a qualified early-years educator with over 15 years of experience working with children from newborn to 12 years old. I have attended multiple educational CPDs, first aid courses, sign language courses, and child psychology courses to develop and enhance my own personal skills.

Visit our "About" section to find out more about me.

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