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We play with play dough every day!
We don’t keep it more than a few weeks, but sometimes it lasts the whole month if we keep it stored in gallon baggies between uses.
We make our own play dough for 7 (actually 8) main reasons:
1. Cost! We use it so much and want to change it out often, so it is just much less expensive to make our own! This is important considering I am the one buying it.
2. Texture: The play dough brand is stiffer and not as easy to work with. The play dough we make is SUPER SOFT and is so fun to work with!
3. Quantity: When we make our own play dough it makes a nice amount of play dough (probably 10 times more than store bought). When we do themes, such as Go Away Big Green Monster, we make green play dough, and EVERYONE wants to work with it making monsters.
4. Ingredients: Who knows what ingredients are in store-bought play dough? I like the fact that all the ingredients in our home-made play dough are found in your kitchen! When our little ones are touching it and some might even try tasting it, I feel it’s at least safe. (Not going to taste good, but safer!)
5. Science/Math: If we choose to make playdough with the kids we let them measure the ingredients, stir and watch it form. We count and discuss color, we talk about the dry vs. wet ingredients and finally see it change from all these seemly random ingredients to some fun play dough!
6. Smell: OK, I admit I LOVE the smell of store-bought play dough (only the original brand!) but not too many people can say that! It brings back memories of my childhood I guess, but it also leaves that smell on your hands and is pretty strong! The smell of our play dough is amazing! We choose to add sugar-free Kool-Aid (dry) or essential oils. Sometimes, we even add pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon, or other spices to create a more seasoned smell. For Valentines Day we add cocoa and have “Chocolate” play dough! Who can resist that?! This last batch of green I ended up adding peppermint essential oils (DoTerra) because I couldn’t find a true green Kool-aid packet in my cupboard. I used green food coloring with it.
*Note: the flavor on the Kool-aid package might not actually give you that color of play dough. We can get purple, orange and red fairly easily. It’s more difficult to find blue, green or yellow.
7. Durability: Our playdough lasts much longer than the store-bought play dough.
8. Options: I actually thought of an 8th reason – I like having options! We can make any color we like, add any smell we like and double or triple the recipe and make as much as we like!
Our Recipe on the Stove:
1 C Flour
1/2 C Salt
2 TBSP Cream of Tarter
2 TBSP Oil (vegetable or similar)
1 C warm water
1 pkg of unsweetened Kool-Aid
Mix all in a pot on med-high heat. Stir CONSTANTLY!
When it begins to form and makes a ball (no longer gooey) dump/scoop out onto wax paper and knead with your hands.
Be careful not to overcook – as soon as it starts forming continue to turn it to cook any gooey parts. If it sticks or looks like it’s “cooking” remove from heat!
We put orange Kool-aid and orange food coloring into the orange/brown play dough. We felt it smelled too much like oranges so we added pumpkin pie spice and cinnamon. The Kool-aid smell will over-power other smells, but we really liked the result!
We added green food coloring and NO Kool-aid to the green playdough and felt it needed some smell. Peppermint seemed natural and we possibly went a little crazy with several drops of my DoTerra oil! However, we have adults, along with the children, who can’t help but continue to smell it! Our OT opened the gallon baggie it was stored in and took a long whif! She returned to it twice. Ha Ha
We all keep smelling our hands and getting the rejuvenating boost from the oil. I think it even made this one softer than the orange one and our hands feel great after playing.
