Nayana, from India and living in Oregon, USA, sent in this great sensory play dough idea. Let’s take a look at it…
What did you do?
Sensory play is an essential activity to engage all the sense of the children. They explore their world by touching, seeing, hearing, tasting and smelling everything around them.
Sensory play dough is an activity that makes a child employs all of his/her senses. The child develops fine motor and gross motor skills along with hand eye coordination.
We went on a nature walk looking for treasures like fallen leaves, acorns, sticks, pebbles and interesting flowers.
J had a great time looking around and collecting treasures in his net. He was observant and did not run away like he usually does. He was excited to notice that leaves are of different textures, shapes, and colors. He learnt to pick larger pebbles as the tiny ones he picked were not staying in the net.
When we started playing with the homemade Salt dough, J observed that we had many different colors and smells to chose from. We used different spices, to provide texture to the play dough and natural colors to tint the dough.
We kneaded the dough together and noted the different smells the spices elicit. J’s favorite was the cinnamon, cumin and turmeric dough. He said it reminded him of cookies.
The doughs we made are:
1. Deep red dough – freeze dried Beetroot and chia seeds
2. Yellow dough – turmeric, cinnamon and cumin seeds
3. Green dough – Fresh Mint leaves and dried mint leaves
4. Purple dough – Lavender buds and purple food color
The recipe for this simple salt dough is provided below.
We recommend taking the dough out into the nature so that your home stays mess free and the kids can explore nature by making molds of the trees, rocks and bushes on the play dough.
Recipe:
1.5 cups flour
0.5 cups salt
2tsp cream of tartar
2 tbsp Oil
1 cup boiling water
Mix all the dry ingredients together and then add oil and water, mix. Once slightly cooled knead the dough till smooth. You can color it while kneading if using multiple colors or you can add the color with the water for a single color.
The diverse smells were so enticing that my LO wanted to taste them. He thought the cinnamon dough was cookie batter.
It is a non toxic dough but it would be wise to not eat/lick the dough due to high salt content.
The textures were different and LOs learn to describe the different feels against their skin.
The activity is toddler approved and they can participate in every step.
Do you have any other projects planned?
We have several activities up on our page. The next ones are baking and some STEM activities for toddlers.
Tell the Housebound With Kids community a bit about yourself…
We are cousins Nayana and Gayathri. We have one kid each, 2 and 3 year old, respectively. We hail from India but live in the USA.
@Rnj.funstation
How are you finding being housebound so far?
It has been an interesting learning experience. At first we found it quite overwhelming but once we got the hang of it we started enjoying all the time we spent together learning something new.
Do you have any tips for other parents?
I recommend letting the child lead. They are natural scientists and their curious questions always turn into great play.
Has this website and community helped you?
The abundance of great activities help us get ideas for keeping the LOs engaged.
