Learn with Play at Home: How to make Rainbow Soap Slime

My kids love messy play! A lot of the art and sensory play that we do involves a certain amount of mess, (perhaps that's part of what makes it so fun?).

One of my daughter's favourite sensory activities, that she first played with at preschool, was Soap Slime.

Now, this is definitely messy play, but it's made from soap, so it must be clean, messy play, right? Well, sort of. It depends on the colouring.

Since the lesson we learnt making cornflour slime, I have been hesitant to use food colouring in their messy play but hey, we won't know until we give it a try, right?

What better way to test than with Rainbow Soap Slime.

How to Make Soap Slime

Ingredients:

Pure soap flakes
Warm water
food colouring (optional)

We like our slime nice and thick so the ratio I use to make my soap slime is: 1 cup pure soap flakes: 2.5 cups warm water

You can purchase pure soap flakes in a box but the cheapest way to make this slime is by grating your own flakes from pure soap bars.

It doesn't take long and is a more cost effective way to make it.

You can also play around with the amount of water you use. Many recipes on the internet work on a 1:3 cup ratio, so it's up to you to experiment with what you prefer.

Directions:

Add your soap flakes and warm water (so that the flakes dissolve) and then whisk using an electric beater. (If you only want one colour of slime, you can add your food colouring at this point)

You can whisk it by hand as well but you'll find it's much quicker and you get thicker, fluffier slime when you use an electric whisk.

As you can see, the mixture multiplies a lot so you will need a large tub to mix it in. We were going to be playing with it in our water table so I just made it directly in the table.

I made 2 batches of soap slime so used 2 cups of pure soap flakes and 5 cups of warm water in total.

As I wanted to make 6 different colours of the slime, I then divided the ready slime into individual bowls, added the colour of choice and gave them a quick whisk.

When the slime was the desired colours, I plopped it back into the water table, ready for our play. I was starting to get a little nervous about the colour in the slime.

Ta-daaaa. Ready for play.

I popped the water table full of slime outside on the back deck on top of a towel to prevent the floor underneath from getting slippery.

I also got an extra towel and a couple of damp face cloths at the ready so that we could wipe faces and hands as needed to ensure that no soap got in eyes.

And then it was time to play!

They didn't get hugely messy but I could still see colour on their clothing so was still a little concerned. Thanks to the soap though, it all washed out without leaving any stains.

Here's what our soap slime looked like after our play. I cleaned down the edges a little and then covered the entire lot with the towel we'd had on the floor.

It should be fine to keep playing with for a number of days after, depending on how much dirt and grit kids have gotten in it.

To dispose of it, I wouldn't recommend tipping it down the drain... for obvious reasons. Use scoops of it when giving the kids a bath or scoop it into a plastic bag and throw in the trash.

When we'd finished playing, Maddie exclaimed that now she'd like to play in the mud kitchen. (Surely it should go mud play first and soap play last, right? Not here.)

As we were all about messy play that day, I agreed and off they went.