Sensory play is not just for the very young. Knowing a few basic recipes will help bust those boring rainy afternoons and give children ownership over their creations.
There are lots of recipes on the web for fabulous sensory slime and dough to make with your kids. But, once you know the basics you can add and adapt and make these creations your own. Why not create a booklet of all your favourites so that they can be returned to again and again.
I know that no matter how old Tiny gets, he still loves making things and creating his own play-dough and slime. Yes, we do have our tubs of bought Play-dough, and we do sometimes buy clay from the art shop - but there are those times when we just want to make our own. All of them will create hours of fun as well as being good for fine motor skills.
I have put together some ideas to get you started.
Salt dough is more lasting and is fantastic for when you are working on a topic.
There are so many things you can make with salt dough. Someone shared their favourite salt
dough recipes with me, and I am going to share it with you. It is very easy and you only need a few items that you can find in your kitchen.
Hi, just half a cup of flour, half a cup of salt and half a cup of water. I didn’t weigh anything and add the water slowly as you may not need it all, if it’s too wet just add more flour. I put each shape on a saucer and dried it for 30 secs in the microwave then at 10’sec increments until it was hard, we then left them for a further half hour on a cooling rack 😊
Once dry you can paint the fantastic models and put them on display.
There are so many topic related things you could make with salt dough. Why not make some crabs and shells for the seaside topic, or insects for the bugs topic. As we are now following the Ancient Egyptians topic - we will be making some scarab beetles and mini mummies etc. I'm sure Tiny will think of a lot more to make for the topic as we go along.
Now let's look at dough.
Sparkly Black Play-dough
You will need:
2 cups of plain flour
2 tbsp vegetable oil
half a cup of salt
2 tbsp cream of tartar
up to 1 and a half cups of boiling water
Black food colouring or 1 tbsp black powder paint plus a few drops of glycerine - and of course some silver glitter or multi coloured glitter.
First mix the flour, salt, cream of tartar and oil in a large mixing bowl
Next add food colouring to boiling water then pour the water into the ingredients in the bowl.
Mix together and add the glycerine. Be careful at the point because it will be hot.
Allow the mixture to cool down and then knead for a few minutes until all the stickiness has gone. Lastly, mix in the glitter.
Or what about gloop. Always a favourite and so easy to make.
And don't forget silly putty. This is definitely a great one to make to keep the kids happy as they pull and stretch the gooey mixture.
This one does not contain borax, but simple cheap ingredients that you can find at your local supermarket.
