Gallery • 3 Photos

Volunteers at the shaving cream station.

On Jan. 27 at exactly 11 in the afternoon, the floodgates were opened. Parents poured into the room with young children that were more than ready to dive into shaving cream and homemade finger paint. Messy Play Day had officially begun.

With a total of seventeen volunteers, the day was set for success before the event had even begun.

The tradition of Community Service Club attendance of Messy Play was started 12 years ago and has been going strong ever since.

According to Community Service Club Sponsor James Lockhart, Messy Play has been “one of our most popular events for the past three years. I think the high school kids love the chance to be little kids again.”

Everyone at the event was given a chance to get messy at the many different stations that were set up. Activities included shaving cream with paint, Oobleck, home-made finger paint, salt crystal painting, feather painting, pasta art, crayon melting and more.

Returning volunteer and Co-President of Community Service Club Regine Rosas thought that the Messy Play event this year was just as successful, if not more so, than those held in years past. “We had a great turn out of volunteers and the kids had lots of fun getting messy.”

Jann Fowler-Cornfeld has been helping organize the Messy Play event for the past 12 years. She believes that high school volunteers have played a vital role in the success of the event. “I worked on the first Messy Play, which was in the winter of the year 2000. It was a lot of work and a lot of chaos with just a few of us adults at the Family Center running it. Messy Play has become bigger and better totally due to the high school students’ contributions.”

The event has been a hit with parents and kids alike. Kids get the opportunity to play, explore and be messy while parents get the opportunity to spend time with their children doing arts and crafts without the stress of clean-up
afterwards.

For the volunteers, the chance to shed the identity of a high schooler and to return to finger painting and pasta-art-making holds immense appeal – but, as Fowler-Cornfeld has accurately observed, the best part of Messy Play is undoubtedly “the interaction between the ‘big kids’ and the ‘little kids’.”

The event proved to live up to its name. By the end of the day, tables, floors and volunteers alike were coated in a thick layer of paint, Oobleck and shaving cream.

Volunteers began clean-up while parents and children shuffled out of the family center, carrying pasta collages and finger-painted masterpieces that would later be proudly put up for display on the fridge.