Sensory Exploration with Tapioca

I wanted this morning's Messy Morning project to be a fun sensory experience.  I've seen tons of recipes online for sensory play using homemade playdough, moondough, slime, and water beads.  I didn't have all the ingredients for those in my pantry, but I did have a package of tapioca, so I thought I'd experiment (I figured it couldn't turn out any worse than yesterday's Art Gone Wrong).

I mixed the pre-cooked dry tapioca with various amounts of water and some food coloring:

The resulting tapioca mixture was a substance with a really neat texture.  With smaller amounts of water, the tapioca resembled rubber and could be formed into all sorts of shapes (great for building 'sand castles').  With more water, it began taking on the texture of jello or slime.  The girls dug right in and had a blast doing some sensory exploration:

I also gave them some paper to make creations on:

L liked to blend the different colors of the tapioca together, while E enjoyed pressing down different colored globs with her spoon.  The bottom picture is mine - I wanted to demonstrate how 3-dimensional this substance can be.  The girls and I played for a long time and it was very cool to see the ideas they came up with for manipulating this substance.  I'd love to re-try the activity with the larger tapioca beads, too.