Air Dry Clay Projects for Kids

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!

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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