My eldest 6-year-old daughter has been pestering me to take out her play dough. She misses the play dough set that I purchased for her years ago. I have thrown it away because the curious toddlers still like to put things into their mouth to explore, and the sticky dough stains my furniture too.
I managed to find a recipe from Learning 4 Kids and tried it out (with a slight alteration) over the weekend. The ingredients used are all natural ingredients which we use for cooking and baking, so it is certainly safe for kids. I don’t have to overly worry if the toddlers put the dough in their mouth, though I would still watch out for risk of choking!
I am delighted with the result, and I want to share it here. If you are keen on making your toys at home, check out Learning 4 Kids for more inspirations.
Ingredients:
2 cups of baking soda
1½ cups of water
1 cup of cornflour
3 drops essential oil (optional, I used lavender)
Preparation time: 10 minutes.
Method
Pour the baking soda, water and cornflour into a saucepan.
Mix the ingredients together and remove lumps.
Turn on the low heat and continue to gently stir the mixture non-stop.
Avoid high heat as the mixture at the bottom may become burnt.
Continue to stir until a thick mixture is formed. See my photo below. Scoop a spoon of the mix out. It should stubbornly stay on the spoon before you turn off the heat on the stove.
To prepare doughs of different colours, scoop them out onto different bowls. Be careful; the mixture should be boiling. Add a few drops of food colouring and two drops of essential oil and blend. For me, I started off using the red food colouring. Halfway through, I divided the dough into 2 and added blue to one of the mixtures.
Start in small quantity; you can add more drops of colourings later if you prefer a stronger tone.
Let the dough cool for a few minutes below you knead into a ball.
Cleaning up the saucepan
The base of the saucepan may be covered with burned dough that is difficult to remove. Fret not. Fill the pot with water, covering all the burned and hardened residual. Bring the water to a boil. The burned dough should soften. Allow the water to cool and gently scrape the residual from the pan.
Note
The dough is sticky when warm. Once it cools down completely, it becomes soft and smooth. However as Singapore is a humid country, the dough will turn stretchy and sticky when in contact with our warm and perhaps sweaty hands. Therefore I am keeping the dough in a ziplock bag in the fridge right now.
Whenever the kids ask to play with the dough, I take out a part of it and keep the rest back into the fridge for later use when the first batch of the dough warm up and becomes sticky. It is necessary to keep the dough in a ziplock bag as the dry environment in the fridge will cause the surface of the dough to become crusty.
As there is no preservative in this recipe, the play dough may only last for two weeks, depending on how frequently the kids play with it.
Have fun!
You may also like the following posts:
Our Favourite Baby Toys – 9 to 15 months
Activities we do with the twins at home – 12 months old to 15 months old
Digging dinosaur bones with my boy
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