Last night, I sliced my finger open {after my very favourite ever vintage mixing bowl fell from our infamous mountain of clean, drying dishes and shattered all over the floor *sob*}.  As I shuffled through our catch-all closet to retrieve the first aid kit, I stumbled upon a giant bag of forgotten about epsom salt.  And that’s how this random little sensory activity began. ☺

Having used regular salt {on trays} for drawing and letter printing practice in my classroom many times before, I knew that epsom salt would be just as fun.  But to amp it up a little and make it more festive, we decided to turn out plain old epsom salt into the candy cane variety with a little peppermint extract and food colouring.

Of course my little helper did most of the work.  

To get started, we measured out a couple of cups of epsom salt into a zip-close bag (you could easily use a jar instead – it just requires a little more shaking power).

Then we added a spoonful of peppermint extract.  And because this was the white batch, zipped up the bag tightly…

And shook it up.

We repeated the process twice more, this time adding food colouring into the mix.  The end result was a tray of minty fresh, candy cane-coloured epsom salt just begging for little hands to play with it.

I gathered up a few spoons and some silicon muffin cups, and Miss G retrieved some Christmas cookie cutters.

Then she got to playing.

First up was making “pucktakes” (cupcakes according to our silly little girl).

Of course pucktakes need candies and cherries on top, so off she went to collect some buttons.

This simple little sensory station kept her happily engaged while I made dinner and washed a big load of dishes, plus our whole kitchen smelled deliciously of peppermint.

And the fun didn’t stop there… When bath time rolled around, Miss G picked her very favourite epsom salt cupcake to take along with her.

(The really neat part is that if you let the salt sit in the silicon cups overnight, they harden and become little pucks that are easily portable to and from the bathtub.)