Soap Carving

After yesterday’s post, I felt the need to post on ways to love our kids well and enjoy our time with them. To that end, I have recently discovered a great blog called Unplug Your Kids. The author shares my views on TV – who needs it? – and offers creative alternatives to engage our children. She presents a weekly Unplugged Project with a theme and encourages others to pool their ideas. In keeping with this week’s theme of White, I wanted to share an activity that my kids enjoy and that can appeal to younger and older children – soap carving on white bars of Ivory soap. I know – children, soap, and knives don’t mix. But there is a safe solution. The book Soap Carving for Children gives step by step directions for making your own carving tools out of popsicle sticks! We found that the popsicle stick tools work best for the simpler projects and are great for young hands. My kids had almost as much fun just shaving off pieces of soap as they did trying to carve a sculpture. They also enjoyed carving faces and designs into the soap, which is much simpler than trying to shape it into something else. We started out following the directions in the book and ended up with our own creations. If you have younger children, they would have fun with a bar of soap and a stick or two. If you have older, patient kids, they will enjoy following the directions, making their own tools and feeling the satisfaction of creating a piece of art.