Homemade Playdough

My children love homemade playdough!

 You can find the recipe here, and some great tips for enjoying it here at counting coconuts   , here at 1+1+1=1, and here and here at Living Montessori Now. That's just a few to scrape the surface of the many great things you can use playdough for. We have a great way to keep our playdough, and I hope to get that post up soon.

 Since I was making some new balls of dough today, I figured I would just take a few pictures and make a 'pictorial' of sorts :)   
                                  
                                   Gather your ingredients
                                         
                            
                                           
                                          1 cup flour


                                                       

                                       1/2 cup salt


                                                            

                                           1 tbsp oil


                                                       

                                   1 tbsp cream of tartar


                                                             

                                              1 cup water


                                     
                      Your choice of color/flavor varieties 
  
 * I used kool-aid packets this time, in lemon-lime, strawberry, lemonade, and a berry flavor, to have green, yellow, red, and blue play dough. You can use a variety of different things here - I have used extracts and food dyes, jello gelatin mixes, drink mixes from large containers, and kool aid mixes. I prefer to mix in the drink mixes or jello mixes simply because you just toss it in when you mix everything, and it cooks right in without any more fuss. I did add a little food coloring to the yellow, as the lemonade mix just turned the playdough a light peachy color and not the yellow I was hoping for, and green to make the green slightly darker. I would suggest adding the food coloring before cooking, simply because you don't have to get it all over your hands if you do it this way.    


Mix all ingredients, first dry, then wet, and stir in a bowl until smooth. Pour in to your choice of pan (I used a 10 inch saucepan, I believe), and stir CONSTANTLY on medium-low heat. The mix will quickly start to look like it is clumping up in a few places, and as you stir, the clump will grow together. When the mix begins to pull away from the pan and gets a dry look to it for the most part, turn it onto a countertop or table top and knead into a smooth ball of dough. It will be warm, but not so warm that you can't work with it. If you find that it is still a little sticky after beginning to knead it, add a little flour. If you feel that it is a little dry (as mine has sometimes been after cooling off) and looks like it has a cracked exterior, just wet your hands with a little water and knead the dough in your hands. It will moisten it to where it should be. The end result should look something like this:   

                            

                          A nice, smooth ball of play dough! 


                             
                      You can also add some fun glitter! 
                     This particular time I added gold glitter to the yellow
                      and silver glitter to the green.




Last, but not least, ENJOY! 




Comments

  1. Janis CoxMarch 23, 2013 at 5:40 PM

    I just love playdough - one of my favourite crafts.
    Linking in from Teach Beside Me.
    Blessings,
    Janis

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Amy @ No Greater HonorsMarch 23, 2013 at 9:04 PM

      Thanks, Janis! My children love it, but I never did like spending money for store bought playdoh that always tended to dry up faster than I wanted to. The last time I made some, we had to throw it away at almost a month old, but not because the play dough was bad - rather because someone decided to play with it on the floor where there were crumbs and it just seemed too gross to keep it! Thanks for stopping by :)

      Delete
  2. UnknownMarch 26, 2013 at 10:04 AM

    Thanks for sharing this helpful breakdown of homemade playdough. It makes it seem fun and easy!

    http://trilliummontessori.org/learning-about-australia/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Amy @ No Greater HonorsMarch 26, 2013 at 1:25 PM

      Thank you Seemi! It truly is SOO easy! I sat on the idea of making it homemade for so long, because I thought it would be hard, but it took less than 10 minutes to make the first ball of playdough, and I made four in about 30 minutes - five, if you count the batch I made when I forgot the salt!!!

      Delete

Post a Comment

I would love to hear what you think of this post! I do pray it has been a blessing, and would be honored to hear your ideas and suggestions!

Popular posts from this blog

To Succeed One Must Never Give Up

Image
Even if that means, the best you can is to blog a few times a year, and always tell yourself you'll pick it back up full time....eventually. Richard Bach said: "A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit" My friends, I claim that for my outSTANDing blogging skills ;) (as I type this, I realize I'm searching for the emoji buttons that surely should be somewhere by now hahaha!) We didn't quit. I mean, I obviously haven't been around this blog in what feels like eons. We are still here, though, alive and kicking!  KLW is going in to the 10th grade this year. When did someone come in my house and allow that to happen? Whoever did is going to get a tongue lashing from me, because this teenager is just a few years from adulthood, and I don't know how I feel about it, to be honest with you.  She's gorgeous.... Kind of quirky.... Has some killer selfie skills She's tall.... really REALLY t
Read more

Reader's Review - Llama Llama, Red Pajama

Image
LLama Llama, Red Pajama written and illustrated by  Anna Dewdney         You have GOT to love the Llama Llama books by Anna Dewdney! Using a llama as a subject, these books give you a different point of view - one of not the adult, but the child. In this particular Llama Llama book, it is a dreaded time of day - bed time! I don't know about you, but I can completely relate with some of my children. Llama Llama goes to bed, but there is a problem - little llama just can't settle down.     Full of bed time woes, the next couple of pictures show the climax of the distress this little llama is going through. What I find interesting here, in looking at this book a little deeper than just as a funny read for a child, is the emotion behind just such a feeling. A touch of seriousness - what if the thoughts our children are having at bed time are far more serious than we think? What may sound absurd to us - being afraid that we ar
Read more

Homeschool tidbits

Image
                               "This isn't so bad." - SW It wouldn't seem like such a big deal to hear that, except this is SW. She balks at everything new, and most things she's done before that were new. I know that sounds crazy, but if you just knew this girl. So this week, we've been working on the relationship between multiplication and division, and how you can use one to remember the other.  We had talked about this a little before our extended winter break, but since it had been a while, she may have had a slight breakdown when I reintroduced it. Thankfully, it was short lived! We are working through reviewing multiplication facts and discovering the art of division :) And honestly, she may be one of my most hard to teach at this point in life because of her tendency to be afraid of something new, despite the fact that she is ridiculously smart and almost always catches on immediately (even if she pretends she doesn't 'get it'
Read more