Day 5 – 30 days of Hands on Play

It’s Day 5 of the 30 days to Hands on Play that I’m redoing organised by The Imagination Tree and Hands on as we grow.

Today’s mission is

Today’s Challenge:  Play Dough Exploration!

We LOVE making our own play-dough and since I discovered the recipe that The Imagination Tree posted for Chocolate play-dough and J turned into a fossil hunt for dinosaurs I’ve been making it for him regularly. This time though I thought we would really get into the challenge and try and make it together.

If you click the link above you will see the recipe that we use and we added different food colourings to the mix (my hands are constantly stained because of using up our food colourings)

We sat down at the table (our normal crafting/play dough/messy play area) and J immediately asked for our shapes. I was very lucky to be brought a HUGE tub of cookie cutters and J’s favourite play-dough activity is to cookie cut at first – so I got the tub down and handed him it for him to choose some.

J playing with the play dough - he's adding aubergine to his carrot to make a spaghetti sauce apparently!

We then moved on from cookie cutting and he started to mix the colours – now this normally irritates me, but with homemade play-dough that takes 4 minutes to make and that the only thing I had to buy which I didn’t have in my store cupboards was the Cream of Tatar it really doesn’t matter when they get mixed up.

T playing with the homemade play-dough

T explored the play-dough as well – which in terms of T meant only one thing – with her mouth. Luckily it’s homemade and I know what has gone into it and she ate it – she’s also called a human dustbin (trashcan!) in our house as will eat anything.

We had so much fun that we kept the play-dough out all day and the play-dough became more and more mixed and brown as the day went by.