My Favorite Homemade Playdough Recipe

Anyone else in the middle of a heat wave? The forecast shows ninety degree weather for the next ten days. That means no outside play for me past 10 a.m. unless it is swimming. Since SourPatch is an outdoor guy, summer is cramping his style just a bit (Bay Area weather! Oh how I miss thee...)

While confined to the air conditioning, we decided to make some homemade playdough yesterday. Usually, this is a pretty fast process; this recipe is pretty slick and quick. Yet after Patches helped me dump and stir all the ingredients, I realized I couldn't find my food coloring. I spent at least 15 minutes flying around the house, trying to figure out where in our move I might have stashed my cake decorating supplies.

This turned out to be fortuitous, as SourPatch was completely entranced by the flour concoction. He stirred, sifted, whisked, and scooped at it with joy. In hindsight, I probably should have let him keep on keeping on and seen how long that would have entertained him. No matter. The point is, we had a great time making and playing with it!

Adapted from The Imagination Tree

Ingredients:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2 tablespoons cream of tartar
• 2 tablespoons canola oil
• 1.5 cups boiling water (I like to boil 2 cups and then measure out the 1.5 in a glass measuring cup so I know exactly how much I'm adding. A lot of water can boil away while you're rummaging for food coloring, it turns out.)
• Food coloring (add to taste? I use the Wilton Gels, so I can't tell you how many "drops" to add. If you look carefully at the pictures, you can see I decided I didn't add quite enough to the water, so I threw some more on the dough while stirring and kneading it.)

In a large mixing boil, whisk the flour, salt, cream of tartar, and oil until well combined. 

Add food coloring to boiling water, and pour 1.5 cups into the flour mixture. 

Use a large sturdy spoon to stir continually until it forms into a sticky ball. Allow the dough to cool until comfortable to touch. (Here, I often split the dough in two and add a few drops of food coloring to one of the balls of dough so I can have two colors, such as blue and green. Just a suggestion.) 

Once cool, knead the dough vigorously until all the stickiness is gone. For my last batch, this took about 3 minutes of kneading. You can add more flour at this point if the stickiness remains (I've never had this problem.)

Voila! Store it in an airtight container, and this playdough should last you 6 months! I'm pretty sure I historically keep mine even longer.

Preschool Alphabet Lesson Plan: The Letter "U"

We recently studied the letter "U" in our preschool lesson and if I do say so myself, we did a mighty fine job of it.

Here are some of the things we did that worked really well:

• Talked about the letter "U" and made this craft with lots of "U" words: the big U is an underground tunnel, an up arrow, umbrella (the little "u" is the handle of the umbrella), unicorn, Uranus. While we worked on the craft, we listened to ukelele music.

• Read What a Treasure by Jane and Will Hillenbrand about a mole who digs underground and finds some seemingly ordinary objects that are treasures to the animals around him. As the mole found the underground objects (like a twig and shell and acorn), the kids drew them on their papers.

• We then pretended that we were at a University and each child picked a profession to pursue. One child wanted to be a doctor. Another chose to be a dancer. Each child had a notebook they used to draw pictures of or glue in odds and ends associated with the mini classes we did. For geography, we learned about the United States of America. For Astronomy, we talked about the planet Uranus. For Music, we taught each other our favorite dance moves and danced to "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid. (See how I tied in all the "U" words. Good times.)

In the end, we had a graduation ceremony and each student received a diploma. They got to dress up in the uniforms (yes, another "U" word) associated with their professions and they played the rest of the time. I sure love my little doctors and dancers.

Bonus: Here is a fun letter 'U' video the kids enjoyed:

Quiet Book: Magnet Board Page

The four of us are collaborating on making quiet books for our children/grandchildren. It has been fun looking at other people's ideas online as well as trying to come up with creative ideas of our own. Recently, I found a magnetic nativity scene at a thrift store,  and I thought how great it would be to have a magnet board page for our quiet books.

I began by cutting a rectangle of felt about an 1 1/2" smaller than my finished quiet book page would be. I centered it on the page and zigzagged it in place. Since it wouldn't be possible to turn this page right side out once the sheet metal is in place, it is important to either use it as a page by itself at the front or back of your quiet book, or sew it to the page that it will be back to back with at this point--before adding the metal--and turn it inside out.

Not long ago I purchased a thin sheet of metal at Home Depot for something else, and there was plenty left over for this project. But you can also buy smaller, prepackaged sheets at Hobby Lobby or other craft stores. I liked cutting my own because I was able to make it larger:

I cut my metal to size with tin snips--about an inch smaller than the felt--and rounded the corners to minimize poke-age potential:

Using E6000, I glued the metal sheet to the felt I had sewn onto my page. My concern about this project is that the edges of the metal might be hazardous. So I was especially careful to put the glue very near the edge of the metal and then push the edges hard into the felt. I bought magnet letters and numbers at the dollar store and will keep my eye out for other fun magnet sets for future use. (Be sure to keep in mind the age of your user; you don't want your magnets to be a choke hazard.)

I wanted a way to store the magnets that also provides a "skill" page. Here are two zipper options that can help little fingers learn how to zip and unzip while they use their magnets:

Craft for Kids: Chicken that squawks

Yes, you read that title right. This chicken that is made from a plastic cup- it squawks. I never would have thought to blog about this activity that I recently did with my daughter and niece and nephew (and we read a book about chickens to go along with the craft)-- except that Laurel told me that she had never seen one of these treasures before:

For some reason, I thought everyone must know about the chickens that you make out of plastic cups, a bit of string, and a damp sponge that actually make a squawking noise. I made my first one in first or second grade...and it is about the only thing that I remember doing in school that year. It definitely made an impression. 

So here's what you do:

Squawking Cup Chicken Craft

Materials:

- Large, red, plastic cup

- Embroidery floss

- a sponge (the ones you scrub your sink with--like one of these)

- orange flannel

- googly craft eyes
- a needle or safety pin

Instructions:

1. Poke a hole in the center of the bottom of the cup with a needle. The hole needs to be big enough to put the embroidery floss through, but small enough that the knotted floss won't slip through it. What was the bottom of the cup, is now the top of the chicken's head.

2. Cut off about a 12-inch piece of embroidery floss, tie a knot at one end, and thread the non-knotted end through the hole that you made. The knot will be at the top of the chicken's head, and the string will hang down through the cup and extend out the open bottom of the cup (or soon to be chicken).

3. Cut a square off the sponge (the square should be about an inch wide and long). Tie the sponge to the bottom of the string that is dangling from the cup.

4. That is it really. Now you can dress the chicken up. Give it a beak (with the orange flannel) and googly eyes and whatever else you dream up. But that is all there is to it. 

Now, how to make it squawk: You put water on the sponge. Wring out any excess water--you just want it damp. Hold the cup with one hand and hold the sponge (which should be attached to the string that is dangling from the cup) with your other hand. Now using your thumb and index finger to hold the sponge, press the sponge so that it sandwiches around the string above it, and jerk it down along the string. That is what makes the chicken squawk. And the kids love it! If that doesn't make sense, You can watch an example of it here. 

 Also, here are a couple of books with chickens as central characters that you could use with the craft: The Problem With Chickens and Little Peep

Enjoy!