Air Dry Clay Projects for Kids

October 24, 2025 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Every now and then I feel the need to delve into what some people might consider a kids’ craft for my mental well-being. Lately it has been air dry clay. It’s easy to make your own air dry clay or you can buy it and use it to make lots of different things.

Playing with clay is stress relieving for both kids and adults, and with these projects you can make things that could be gift-worthy come holiday season.

The classic of course is making pinch pots, which is so easy to do you probably don’t need instructions, but just in case, this tutorial from Friends Art Lab is a good one. Pinch pots are great to do with a group of kids because they don’t take a lot of time or supplies, and kids will have fun painting them after they are dry.

Or you can make these adorable birds with pinch pot nests from Artful Parent. These mosaic pinch pots with lids from Handmade Charlotte are also great.

But there are lots of other fun things kids can do with air dry clay.

These pretty clay vase candle holders form Play Learn Inspire can be made with a printable template to helps kids keep them the same general size. I love the idea of using different things to stamp them as well as different ways to make holes.

Kids can shape clay into their favorite animals to make a craft like these air dry clay cats from NurtureStore. Or they can make their own creatures with this clay monster tutorial from One Little Project.

Make sweet pendants kids can decorate, paint and wear with this tutorial from Kitchen Table Classroom. Or grab some seashells from your last trip to the beach and make seashell pendants with this idea from Moms and Crafters.

Pendants are only a short journey from the classic air dry clay or salt dough Christmas tree ornaments, so you can also just pull out your cookie cutters and let kids decorate simple shapes to decorate the tree. Once you get started with air dry clay I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of ways to use it!

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Christmas Gifts Kids Can Make

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Tips for Teaching the Alphabet to Kids

If you have a little one learning their letters at home or at school, it can be helpful to know a bit about the science that goes into learning your letters and how the experts teach letter recognition.

Knowing the alphabet is the basis for learning how to read, so it’s important to get it down. Kids need to know the differences between letters, to be able to recognize their shapes and to know what sounds the letters make individually before they can start combining them in words.

Proud to Be Primary suggests starting with letters that are meaningful to the child such as the letters in their name. Tracing letters and doing letter matching and other games with letters are great ways to start kids on the road to recognizing letters. Then things like alphabet songs, books and picture cards can be added in to help with phonics and the basics of reading.

This Crafty Mom talks about using the Carnine method for teaching letter recognition, which starts with all lowercase letters and separates letters that look similar to each other (like b and d, or c and e). This makes a lot of sense because it’s not as confusing, and you can learn alphabetical order later.

How Wee Learn uses a slightly different order but the idea is the same, though she also would start with the letters in a child’s name, then go on with the rest of them. This post includes more fun games for letter recognition including digging up letters and taping letters on the floor for kids to throw paper airplanes on.

Looking for more fun ways to learn the alphabet and letter recognition? This Kaboom game from The Many Little Joys is easy to make, fun for little kids, and once you’ve used it to learn letters you can make a new version for sight words, numbers, basic math problems and more.

Early Learning Ideas has tons of letter activities including collages, crafts, tactile letter cards, letter recognition activities and much more. Do one letter a day or a week and your kiddos will know their letters in no time. And be sure to grab these cute printable alphabet books from Life Over Cs, which give kids easy activities for recognizing letters and words that begin with them.

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