red, yellow & blue.......

i don't know about where you live, but we haven't been so lucky when it's come to heat waves lately. our humidity levels & "feels like" temps have been so high that over the last two weeks, we have rarely left the comfort of our air conditioned home-unless of course, it's to go to the pool. that being said, we've been doing a lot of indoor activities with our babyeel and this last weekend, we made play dough! 


i still have my big book of early childhood activities from college & has it ever come in handy! from years & years of lesson planning to now with my own little nugget, it's inspired many ideas/activities! along with covering things like, gross/fine motor, art, language, science & math activities, it also has a little recipe section in it. we decided to go with the basic play dough recipe, which is as follows:

5 C flour

2 C salt

4 T cooking oil

add water to right consistency (about 1 1/2 C for me)

i mixed the first three ingredients & then slowly started to add water. i soon discovered that it was much easier to take off my wedding ring and mix everything by hand-it was somewhat meditative too. 

just keep slowly mixing in water until you get the right consistency. if you've ever played with real play doh, you'll know what you're looking for, although this dough comes out a little more like the pizza dough kids get at pizza places while they wait for their food than store bought play doh. it should look something like this:

if you want to make colored play dough, you've got a few options. first, if you have food coloring or tempera paint in powered form, feel free to toss it in with your dry ingredients. if not, you can use liquid food coloring. i decided to make 4 colors (all i had), so i separated my big lump of dough into 4 equal parts & i dropped in a few drops of natural food coloring (no red dye #5 for my little guy). knead and if you must, add more color until you get your desired shade of play dough. they all came out good, except yellow. it was kind of weak!

while H is a typical toddler boy in many ways, he also stands alone when it comes to getting easily grossed out. like when it came to helping me mix the dough for one! he refused to touch it and it took about an hour or so after it was made for him to consider holding it in the ziplock bag i put it in and about another hour after that before he was ready to touch & play with the actual dough. papaeel & i had to do some pretty good convincing before he'd give it a whirl and while he's more apt to play with it now, he still kinda cringes when feeling it between his fingers.