15 Water Play Ideas:

[Crystal]

Here are a list of water play ideas, from redleaf press:

http://www.redleafpress.org/client/PDFs/Water_Play.pdf

[Michael]

I pasted Crystal's pdf here:

Painting Pavement or a Wooden Fence: Put food coloring in the water bucket, and use paintbrushes of all sizes. Hardware stores have sponge brushes that make great paintbrushes for extra busy children. Old pastry, shaving, and makeup brushes are usable too.
Shaking Feathers: Fill a wading pool or large tub with water. Give the extra busy child a few feather dusters to dip and shake.
Blasting Balls: Fill a tub or wading pool with water. Throw a variety of balls inside—ping-pong, tennis, bouncy, or Koosh. Give the child different-sized turkey basters to blast the balls.
Playing Freely: Fill water tables or tubs with shovels, spoons, strainers, sponges, shells, and empty containers. Let the child play freely in the water. Add food coloring to the water if you like.
Absorbing Water: Fill a wading pool or tub with water. Let the child have a variety of materials: terry cloth, netting, panty hose, sponges, silk, velvet, or a clean diaper. This activity will get an extra busy child’s thinking wheels turning. Get ready for questions.
Bathing Bird: Let an extra busy child splash in a clean bird bath with bubbles frothing inside. (Buy a plastic bird bath specifically for bubble play. Clean and cover it after each use.)
Here is the basic bubble recipe I use for bird bath play:
add about 2 tablespoons dish soap to a cup of water, add more water and glitter or food coloring for flare.
Beating Bubbles: Fill a large bucket with water and a few teaspoons of dish soap. Give the extra busy child an egg beater or whisk for beating bubbles.
Chasing Colored Cubes: New Mexico can serve up some hot summer days. Bella enjoys having colored ice cubes thrown into her wading pool on especially hot ones. I give her a small bug net so she can try to scoop them up before they melt.
Washing Toys: Wash down bicycles, scooters, or dolls with a big bucket of soapy water. Use oversized sponges and lots of suds. Feeling adventurous? Wash the car together.
Playing in Puddles: From thrift stores, purchase several pairs of old galoshes. Make big puddles with a hose (if they are not already supplied by rain) for extra busy children to slosh through. Hand out several plungers specifically set aside for puddle play. Feeling extra brave? Add dirt and have the children mix up mud with only their galoshes.
Keeping a Beach Ball in the Air:
Fill a wading pool with water and a couple teaspoons of bath bubbles. Use a water hose to bring the bubbles to life. Pairs can play beach volleyball with the pool acting as a net. The object of the game is to keep the ball and yourself from falling into the water.
Hunting: Fill a tub or wading pool with extra bubbles. Toss several small objects that sink into the water. Have the child hunt for them.
Squirting: Fill up several squirt bottles with water. Let children squirt each other.
Dumping: Extra busy children, especially toddlers, love to dump bottles filled with water. Fill several and watch in amazement.
Filling or Racing Balloons: Fill up mini water balloons to play catch or enjoy water balloon races.

[My4SunshineGirlsNY]

Thank you for those! I love new ideas!

[originalkat]

Cool ideas. My kids LOVE water play! Thanks for sharing.

[Vesta]

My dd is a rock head and likes to go through the river rock that is our garden path and find the fossils and pretty rocks. She'll take a basket of rocks to clean at the water buckets outside quite often.
One time she neglected to take the rocks back and I thought the other kids were washing rocks like she does (because they look so different when they are wet).
They were actually making little stone structures in the water.
Sooooo
I got out the baby pool and filled it with about 5 inches of water, drug a bucket of rocks over and they started making little streets and paths with the rocks.
One of the children asked for fish, so we got the little plastic fish out and they had a whole little fish city going on.

I keep all of our plastic bottles and jars. The kids will crush up chalk and add it to the bottles to make different colors of water, or flavors of lemonade.

I love this list.
I think we will be washing the riding toys next week.