Play Dough Recipe
Ideas And Activities For Toddler Crafts

Here's an easy homemade play dough recipe which works really well for toddler crafts and 13 of the best ideas for activities so all your kids enjoy it.

You'll find:

• A list of easy play doh recipe ingredients
• Instructions
  
• Helpful tips
  
• Ideas for fun toddlers activities
  
• Try shell print patterns and making birds' eggs
  
• Ways to have playdough fun by adding lovely scents and colors
  

Playdough is always more fun when you make it yourself!

Homemade Play Dough Recipe

Ingredients

1. 300g (12 ounces flour 
   
2. 115g (4 ounces) salt
   
3. 225ml (8 fluid ounces) water
4. 2 tablespoons oil
   
5. 4 tablespoons cream of tartar
   
6. Food coloring in different colors; optional: glitter, flavored oils
   

As you can see, the homemade recipe is basically very easy - you've probably got everything in the house apart from cream of tartar and maybe food coloring.

The ingredients are very similar to our easy homeschooling salt dough recipe so, if you really can't find the cream of tartar, you could make salt dough instead!

You start by adding all the play-doh recipe ingredients together in a big bowl except food coloring.

As you work the ingredients together they'll naturally start forming themselves into a play-doh ball.

To help the recipe ingredients firm up into proper playdough, you need to heat them on a very low heat in a pan, keeping stirring all the time.

You can tell how gentle the heat was because, instead of using a spoon to stir, I mixed it in the pan using my hands.

You shouldn't need to heat the recipe for long until you've got a nice firm play dough lump which isn't sticky.

Keep kneading until it firms up.

How To Make Play Dough

• There is one vital ingredient left out before you've really made homeschool play-doh and that's color.

I think you can see this homeschooling recipe is dead easy, but take care on the next bit.

You'll only see photos of my red, yellow and blue homemade play dough recipe because the green is a sludgy gloop confined to the homeschool trash can!

You need to add a surprising amount of food color to the homeschool play dough recipe to make the dough turn from an insipid grayish color to something attractive for toddler crafts.

There's a fine balance between getting the color right and giving your play-doh too much to cope with!

You'll find food dye comes in handy with our homeschool silly putty too!

• I also recommend mixing the colors wearing plastic gloves; it does get messy and it does take a bit of time and effort (I lost my playdough helpers at this point.)
  

Play Dough Crafts

You should now have some pretty balls of homeschooling playdough to tempt everyone from your toddler up.

Playdough Activities

Here are lots of ideas for what you can do with your homeschool playdough recipe now you've made it.

13 Best Playdough Ideas

• Your toddler could pick some flowers from the garden and add them to their dough.
• Pretend food always goes down well, as you'll see from the toddler chef ideas in our homeschooling Activities for 2 year-olds.

• Add some non toxic scents (like orange, peppermint or vanilla) to your homemade play dough to get your toddler sniffing!

• Get a rolling pin and let your kids have fun rolling the dough flat and cut out shapes with plastic cookie cutters like in the photo. A fun way to make everything from letters to lions and elephants. 

• You can put glitter or sequins on the play-doh for homeschooling crafts with extra sparkle.

• Our homemade playdough recipe is great for taking impressions. How about shells, hand prints, a plastic fork?

• Straws are great for making toddler crafts which need eye holes or a nose.
  

Galaxy Playdough

I love this idea from Jeni.

• If you add glitter to your homemade black playdough recipe, you can make a galaxy of stars.
  
• Jeni suggests adding olbas oil for extra fun.
  
  

• Such a brilliant idea to add to fun space activities.

More Playdough Ideas

There are plenty of play-doh squirting and squeezing machines you can get in various shapes and and sizes as well as dough cutters and shapers. 

• But of course rolling sausages between your palms is just as good, and you could practice toddler crafts by helping your child lay the sausages one on top of another to make a homeschool coil pot. 

• Homeschooling pinch pots are another alternative which work well.

• Play dough bird nests were a great homeschool favorite with William and Catherine. Rolling the balls to make multi colored eggs may have confused the mother bird a little but made very pretty homeschooling toddler crafts. 

Where would you like to go now?

Here are some of my most popular homeschooling  pages.  Click on the pic to go to the page.  And - enjoy!

Whatever you do with our homeschool play dough recipe, I hope you have fun!

Want to remember this? Pin this Play Dough Page to your favorite Pinterest board!

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