41 Awesome Messy Play Recipes for Wheelchair Users

Messy play is a brilliant opportunity for increased sensory stimulation, imaginative or pretend play and a huge amount of fun.

These messy play recipes from Lemon Lime Adventure are easy to recreate at home and lots of them taste great too!

Making the Messy Play can be a great shared activity with opportunities for play with the different ingredients even before the Messy Play is ready!

Make sure to always have wipes, a bowl of water or a towel available so your child can clean their hands as soon as they want or need to.

Wet messy play is better for children who seek tactile inputs or who don’t mind getting messy. If your child doesn’t like getting messy or is sensitive to touch, try our ‘Dry Messy Play’ page for ideas which they may tolerate better.

What are the benefits of messy play?

Feeling different textures is good for stimulating brain development as well as helping your child get used to different sensations.
The part of the brain which feels what is happening in the fingers and what happens in the mouth are close to each other in the brain, so if a child gets used to a texture with their hands it is going to make it easier to tolerate this in their mouth.
Try 2 handed play. This is great for brain development – as is crossing the middle of the body with your child’s hands so try and incorporate these if possible.
There is a strong cause and effect with messy play so children without much independent movement can still make a big impact which is great for learning and enjoyment.
Messy play allows forhand strengthening and developing hand/eye coordination. For those with reduced sensation, messy play is a lovely way to give them a lot of sensory input so can be a great place for learning and developing gross and fine motor skills.

How to interact with messy play?

The most straight forward technique is just to help your child put their hands in the substance and help them feel around. If they have tight hands or don’t get to manipulate many things, make sure the messy play gets into their hard to reach areas like in their palms or between their fingers. This extra stimulation will help with their brain development as they learn more about their body.
If they have tight hands then a finger, hand or wrist stretch before the activity may help them feel the messy play more effectively. You could also wake up their hands by massaging or squeezing their fingertips, hands and lower arms so they get the most out of the activity.
If your child can hold objects, or with some hand over hand help, use kitchen utensils to play with the substance – using a wooden spoon to stir, a ladle or spoons to scoop some into a different container or a potato masher to squish the substance.
You can also put different objects into the substance – things they need to find or things to play with e.g. cars or plastic animals/ dinosaurs/ figurines. This will also help them with fine motor and visual perception skills. Try dropping some items inside the substance and see if they can find them – start with bigger objects so they hardly have to touch the messy play mixture and then get smaller and smaller so they have to get their hands in it and manipulate the substance to find the object.

41 Messy Play Recipes from Lemon Lime Adventures

We found these exciting messy play recipes from Lemon Lime Adventures and had to put them on our list of things to try at home!

41 recipes for making all kinds of messy play – from slime, dough and oobleck to shaving cream, edible recipes and ones you want to keep for outside. Try making the messy play with your child as this will introduce much of its own sensory inputs and fine motor skills.