We’ve had plenty of rainy days the past couple of weeks. That, combined with not spending a lot of our days at home due to the renos, has meant needing to create some new activities for Sam. This rainy day activity comes straight out of my own childhood. I used to spend hours, creating with play dough!
When I was a kid, we bought some name brand play dough on occasion, but my mom also used to make homemade batches of dough. There are lots of tutorials & recipes out there for making your own play dough. I decided to try the one from Modern Parents Messy Kids. The thing that appealed to me, was the use of jello packets for colour. Not only does the play dough come out quite vibrant, but it also has a fruity smell! Fun stuff!
I’ve tried making up two separate batches and the recipe works out pretty good. I did find that I had to add quite a bit more flour to the dough once it cooled & I started to knead it into shape. It recommends that you keep the dough refrigerated between uses and I sort of ignored that, but on days when the house warms up, the dough gets almost too sticky to use. So now I’ve started keeping it in the fridge.
We made up batches of lime and raspberry. Sam got really into it the first day, squishing the dough, making piles, and ripping off pieces. I cut up some straws for him to stick into the dough and gave him a couple of plastic cookie cutters to use. The cookie cutters were mostly ignored, but he did enjoy the straws. We made aliens together and managed to kill off a good 20-30 minutes.
Looking forward to some more days of play dough making (lots of colour/flavour options on the horizon) and squishy fun. Think I need to start collecting some more “tools” (pipe cleaners, textured rollers, potato ricer, plastic knife, etc.)