Taste-safe baby colour mixing

Following on from our sinking and floating in water play, I thought I'd try out another vaguely science-based activity with my youngest son (10 months old). My older one enjoys mixing primary colours to make secondary colours with his lab set, and the little one seems to like playing with brightly coloured things so I thought a colour mixing activity had potential to be fun.

Literally everything goes in the little one's mouth (he's eaten mud, grass, cardboard, attempted eating shoes...) so I went for a totally edible approach. I did discourage eating it but if he stuffed some in his mouth I wanted it to be harmless.  I took some plain fromage frais and to each of three teaspoonfuls I added red, blue and yellow food colouring. I put each colour in a separate blob on his white and easily cleanable high chair tray (with a big bib on this time!) and let him mix them around with his hands.

Surprisingly he started mushing them around with his fingers and made some orange and green before he tried to shovel any in his mouth. I tried to point out the colours he started with and the ones he had made, but if I'm honest I think this was probably completely lost on him. The colours were pretty pale as I'd been quite mean with the amount of food colouring (as I feared he'd be consuming a lot of it) so they weren't very bright.

Playing with coloured fromage frais and creating colour mixes

He liked mushing the cold fromage frais around and he had a whale of a time poking, pushing and splatting it, and generally making a multicoloured mess! He clearly enjoyed it so much so that very little made it to his mouth (and when he had some uncoloured stuff the next day he didn't try to play with it, which I was a little concerned about!). 

Since I tried this activity, he's developed a fascination with pointing to colours in a book we read frequently and waiting for me or his brother to say the name of them, so I will try something like this again soon.

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