DIY Play Dough + An Additional Activity!

Written on January 19, 2023

by Jordan Engdahl

Welcome to yet another craft and fine motor activity for your young child to explore and learn through. 

In this post, I’ll actually be announcing two activities you can do with your child(ren)!

I started out with just wanting to do a fine motor activity with our 17 month old daughter that includes play dough, a dry spaghetti noodle or skewer, and cheerios. (More on this activity later).

In this activity, your child will pick up the cheerio (see alternative items in activity description), and string them onto the noodle or skewer. This is a fantastic skill to work on for pincer and eye-hand coordination development. 

Though, as I was gathering my materials, I needed something to hold (in our case) the skewer down. At this age, stringing is a very new and complex skill. Stringing beads or cereal onto a necklace can bring tricky (but, not impossible!) for a young toddler/older baby to accomplish, as they may have trouble holding the string steady in one hand, stringing beads onto the string in the other hand, and making sure they don’t fall off on the end.

In a necklace activity, you may tie a knot at the bottom, but on a skewer or noodle, that is not possible. 

So, I wanted to place our skewer into play dough, as a stable base. Our problem, was that we didn’t have any… 

SO WE MADE SOME! 

It was easy peasy, and it made our project much more exciting! There are a million (probably not that many, but you catch my drift) recipes for making your own play dough.

My best advice is to look up play dough recipes on the internet and pick the recipe that includes all the ingredients that you have right in your own kitchen. 

What’s even more fun, is that you can have your child help as much as possible in the making of the play dough. And then, even let them explore with it before using it in the stringing activity! If that’s what you choose to do. 

Side note, I have a point, just bare with me. We just got gifted one of those Toddler Tower’s for Christmas. I’ll link it below, but if you’re unsure on what I’m talking about, it’s just like a safer step stool for your young children. You can adjust the height, as well as it has a back bar on it so they can’t fall off as easily.

SIMPLAY3 TODDLER TOWER ADJUSTABLE STOOL

Click to for Stool Link

It’s so nice, because Rilynn, our daughter, just climbs up and down when she wants to be included in kitchen activities that are happening above her eye level, instead of asking me to carry her (at least not as much as she did before, haha!). Different companies make them, as well as a variety of different colors or materials, like plastic or wood. 

Anyways, back to my point, while her easily being able to reach the counter, I let our daughter (with my help) pour in each ingredient, and then stir just a little bit. But, it does call for stirring, consistently, over low heat on the stove, so I did most of that step. She was bored by the making of the play dough by that point anyways. I mean, I had to sit there for a good 10 minutes probably before it was completely done, and it really looks the same to her the whole way through.

After we finished making the play dough mix, I rolled it on the counter - in some flour - and showed her how to flatten it out and squish it up. I, then, gave her a cookie cutter, and let her explore away! 

After she, quickly, got over the texture, she had a blast smushing her fingers through the pay dough and pushing the cookie cutter into it.

She also had a snack bowl of cheerios next to her and actually started using them to press into the gingerbread cut out. I used this chance to talk about eyes, and buttons.

TIP! It’s so important to use every moment possible to use language with a young child. This is how they learn. It may seem small and dumb to you, especially when you’re saying things like, “You used the cheerios to make eyes for the gingerbread man.”

But really, dissect this for a baby or toddler’s brain. In one sentence, you just taught them that this specific food is called a Cheerio. That eyes go in a specific area on a face (you could even point to yours or the child’s when saying this). And you taught them what a “gingerbread man” looks like. So, my best advice is to talk about EVERYTHING! They’ll show you how quickly they learn! 

Back to our play dough though, I wanted to make sure I mentioned that she most DEFINITELY tried to pick the dough apart a few times and eat it. I mean come on, it looks like cookie dough, am I right?! But, she finally got her chance with her quick and slick little fingers and BOY, DID SHE REALIZE, IMMEDIATELY, THAT IT WAS A MISTAKE! Haha! 

I’m laughing, because she wasn’t harmed in any way. She didn't consume enough to make her sick, plus I used all natural food ingredients, but it’s about half salt. This was most definitely a chance for me to work on my poker face, because I promise their was a lot of laughing going on inside my head with the faces she was making. (She got some water to wash it down, don’t worry!)

And then, we were quickly done with that activity.

This is the recipe that I used for our play dough:

DIY Homemade Play Dough

Ingredients

• 1 cup water

• 1/2 cup flour

• 1 cup salt

  
  

1. Mix all of the ingredients into a stove top pot, and continously stir on low heat. 

2. Continuously stir for about 10 minutes or until thick (it looks a bit like mashed potatoes. and clumps together).

3. You can either add food coloring in the pot, or divide dough into the desired amount of bowls and mix in food coloring. 

4. Flour table and roll out dough. If you have multiple colors, do one at a time.

5. Roll and knead ball of dough into flour on table until it does not stick your hands or the table easily. Don’t worry about being generous with the amount of flour.

Have fun exploring!

*This is a good recipe if you are interested in making cut out (salt dough) ornaments or clay art pieces. Create your masterpiece and let dry for 24+ hours. (If you’re making an ornament, make sure to poke a hole, for string, before it hardens)

This makes quite a bit, so we only used a small handful that fit one cookie cutter into it, and I stored the rest in a Tupperware container.

Storing Play Dough

I have read that normally you can keep homemade play dough at room temperature. I’d probably only keep it for about a couple weeks, otherwise at some point it’ll start to dry out. Although, I have heard that it can last for months when stored properly, even on the counter. 

You can also store it in the refridgerator if you’re looking to keep it for a longer period of time. If you seal it correctly, it can last for months as well.

Wrap each individual color in plastic wrap and place in either a plastic zip top bag (make sure all excess air is released) or in an air tight container.  

Disclaimer: I put our homemade play dough in just a regular plastic Tupperware from the super market. I did not wrap it in cellophane and by the next day it had gone to mush. It was too sticky so I tried to re-flour it. That also did not go well. I thought about redoing the steps by stirring on low heat and then adding more flour. Maybe it could have worked, but I was going to the store that day, so ours ended up in the trash and my wallet spent a dollar on cheap molding clay.

Sometimes, it is what it is, haha!

THIS is mom life.

We’ll try again another day! But, maybe I’ll even try another recipe just to see the difference!

School Time!

Now, more detail on our stringing activity!

ADDITIONAL ACTIVITY: Cheerio Threading or Stringing

Alternative Materials

The “base”: play dough, a paper or plastic cup taped upside down to the table (poke holes in the bottom)

The “string”: Spaghetti noodles, skewer, chopstick, straws

The “beads”: Cheerios, from loops, dry pasta (Rigatoni), beads 

*beads may be a choking hazard for young children. Always do this activity with a supervising adult.

When choosing your “string,” make sure the “bead” you’re using has a large enough hole in the middle to thread onto. 

• We used Play Dough as our “base.”

• A wooden skewer (I broke off the pointy end and placed the broken side into the play dough) as our “string.”

• And Froot Loops for our “bead.” We have tried this activity twice now. I used Cheerios the first time and was hoping that Froot Loops would have a bigger hole in them. This wasn’t the case. I could have switched our “string” to a spaghetti noodle, but I was more worried about her being too rough with the pasta and breaking it. So, I just picked out the cereal pieces that had big enough holes to fit (it’s my family’s box, so don’t come at me with your sanitary issues, LOL). 

She really focuses when she does this activity to make sure she places the cereal in the exact spot to string it on. It’s really cute to see. I feel like I can watch her mind turning and learning as her forehead crunches and her eyes focus. 

Plus, she got a nice second snack incorporated too! Haha. I’m pretty sure her pattern was she would eat two, then string one, eat two, and string one, over and over again. 

I might’ve created a little salt and sugar monster after this activity! Oh no! 

Notice how she found out through observation, that holding the skewer would help stabilize it to better assist her while threading the cheerios on.

DEVELOPMENTAL ASPECTS

PLAY DOUGH:

• Gross Motor: using their hand strength to mix ingredients together in the pot, as well as when they “smush” it together when playing with it.

• Fine Motor: by using their fingers when they play with the play dough

• Comprehension: Children will listen to the adult describe and explain the play dough making process as they listen and comprehend the language you are using and attaching the words to the materials they are using.

CHEERIO THREADING:

• Problem Solving: children will solve the problem of how to fit the “cheerio” hole onto the “thread”

• Fine Motor: Children will use their fingers and hand-eye coordination to pick up the “cheerio” and thread it specifically through the hole to make a line up of cheerios.

• Observation: The child will make connections on the observations they see while watching a material with a spaghetti noodle go through the hole of a cheerio.

• Patterns & Color Observation: Talk about colors and patterns if using Froot Loops or colored beads.

Rilynn decided the dog needed to enjoy a snack too!

Keep reading to see how we tried using Pipe Cleaner a few months later!

Look at the focus on that child!

First of all, do you know how long it took me to remember what these things were called?!

My Grandma always called them ‘Fuzzy Wuzzies’ and I knew that must not be right! Haha!

Anyways, a few months after Rilynn enjoyed her threading activity, we decided to try it again with a pipe cleaner! I knew this was going to be a bigger challenge as it wasn’t stabilized to anything like the skewer we had previously used, which was stable in the play dough.

She is almost 19 months now and as she may have strung one or two Froot Loops onto the pipe cleaner, she did struggle a bit with the instability of it. So I ended up holding one end, as it would stay a little sturdier, as she held the top to perfectly get it into the hole of the Froot Loop cereal.

It was quite cute to watch actually, because she would hold the Froot Loop with her fingers over the hole at first, so I modeled how to pinch the sides of it to make the hole be open and available for the pipe cleaner. After only a few times, she remembered and would make it a point to fix the cereal in her hand to help her thread better!

I also, ended up making a small loop at the bottom of the pipe cleaner in the case that she ripped it out of my hand and they would go flying. It ended up working out perfectly, because she did like to grab it from me often to observe how many were on it after each piece!

She thought it looked like a bubble wand!

This is also a great time to practice counting and color recognition!

Have Fun! And let us know how these activities go with your children or an alternative way you achieved them (or didn’t achieve – I’m talking about the play dough in particular. Haha!).

Andddd here we are with our final result! I did not teach her this...