Lesson Plans

Ideas and resources

DIY: Play Dough

by 2 Comments

100_1856
My play dough making days have taught me three things:
-I don’t like the cooked kind.  I always burn it or it burns me.
-No recipe calls for enough flour.  Why is that?
-Things that are going to be ruined by children should not call for weird/expensive ingredients

Couldn’t find a recipe that fit my requirements, so I invented my own.  Makes great mold-able play dough (apparently also fun to eat-why child, why???) that lasts for quite a long time, especially when kept primarily in the fridge.  And the best part is that it is made up completely of items already found in your kitchen (alum? really?!? who has that just lying around?).

The BEST Play Dough

Ingredients:
1/4 cup salt
1 1/4 cup flour (amount of flour may vary slightly depending on altitude)
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 T vegetable oil
1/2 cup water
food coloring

Combine the flour and salt in a mixing bowl.    Set aside

Boil water in microwave. Remove from microwave once it has started to boil (I realize you guys aren’t idiots, I just wanted to be clear).  Add baking soda, vegetable oil and food coloring to water.  I am generous with the food coloring.  I like the colors to be dark.  Let the water cool down enough that you can touch it.  If you don’t let it cool, your play dough will end up grainy-believe me.

Add the water mixture to the flour and salt combination.  Stir/knead adding more flour as needed until it isn’t sticking to your hands anymore.  Let the dough cool completely. Play time!

Store in Tupperware or be eco friendly and store in old cottage cheese/sour cream containers.  Lasts longer in refrigerator.

Next Plan Idea:

Comments

Trackbacks

Have you read?

Sun Activities for Kids

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked. 

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *