Home > Sensory Play for Kids > Homemade Autumn Playdough Recipe

Homemade Autumn Playdough Recipe

Playdough is such a simple thing to make I always use our no-cook playdough recipe and this time was no exception – what I love about this easy homemade playdough recipe is that it allows you to add so many different things to it to theme it or make it suitable for the season. For our October Playdough, I wanted to bring the scents of Autumn to our table and autumn colours so that we could explore and introduce some sensory vocabulary for the season.

Autumn Playdough - working on sensory vocabulary

To explore the playdough – I set up some nature finds from a recent autumn walk including Sweet Chesnuts, Conkers, Leaves and branches that T could use to explore the dough with and see what patterns it could make as well as combine them to create some interesting structures.

Materials Needed

Ingredients for making Homemade Playdough

Orange Food Colouring (Paste or gel gives a more vibrant colour)
Ground Cinnamon
Ground Nutmeg
Ground Cloves
Ground Ginger
Ground All Spice
Orange flavouring or essential oil

A preschool girl playing in fall leaves throwing in the air with a white background behind.

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Making up the playdough

Mix up the recipe according to the instructions on our homemade playdough recipe - into the water add in the orange food colouring as well as the spices and flavouring.

Why not try some of these other homemade playdough recipes

Exploring Nature Finds and playdough

Autumn Playdough - working on sensory vocabulary

We took the exploration of the nature finds with the playdough as an opportunity to extend some language. I love sitting down with T and both of us having our own sets of playdough or combining and sharing a set, this time we shared as I wanted to talk about the feel, smell and look of the playdough and our nature finds.

Autumn Playdough - working on sensory vocabulary

I set up the playdough and the finds and we first looked at them - the conker (horse chestnut seed/buckeye) looked shiny, the sweet chestnut case looked prickly and the leaves crunchy and dry. The playdough was Orange and looked like it would be squidgy. Take time to add in other words ask children to "guess" what it may smell like, or feel like whilst you look at the objects.

Autumn Playdough - working on sensory vocabulary

We then picked up the objects and explored them with our hands - the sweet chestnut was hurty - we took the opportunity to talk about what made it hurt and why it may do that. T explored the prints that the nature finds made in the dough, whilst she made the prints we could talk about the words associated with printing like pressing hard, or gently, rolling.

Autumn Playdough - working on sensory vocabulary

As we played with the objects and the dough T noticed the smell "What's the lovely smell", we took time to see if we could identify any of the smells - she said she could smell gingerbread men and apple crumble mixed together. Our hands smelled like oranges - for some reason the orange smell stayed with our hands whereas the spices used didn't as much.

Autumn Playdough - working on sensory vocabulary

All of the language we used as we played together form part of her sensory vocabulary which as we play through the seasons we can start to introduce more and more.

Autumn Playdough - working on sensory vocabulary
Author
Cerys Parker

Cerys is a marine biologist, environmental educator, teacher, mum, and home educator from the UK. She loves getting creative, whether it is with simple and easy crafts and ideas, activities to make learning fun, or delicious recipes that you and your kids can cook together you'll find them all shared here on Rainy Day Mum.

One Comment

  1. You may want to remove the word sauce from cream of tartar in the ingredients list
    Cream of tartar is a powder found with the spices, very different then tartar sauce. Just so there is no confusion for your readers whilst shopping for ingredients 😉

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