Cloud Dough {12 Days of Sensory Play}

Before I begin…  Lest any of you mommas think I have it all together with the perfect activities for my child…  I started off wanting to make play dough.  When I realized I don’t have cream of tarter, a key ingredient to make the best homemade play dough, I resorted to just making the no-cooking kind.  After getting the bowl out and everything ready, I remembered, we’re out of salt.  And play dough needs a WHOLE CUP.  Epic mommy fail.  We’ll make that some other day.

Day 1 Sensory Play

Instead, today we made cloud dough (or moon dough) because it only needs two ingredients!  Two ingredients, people!  And if you don’t have baby oil on hand, use regular canola oil (or I suppose you could try substituting with anything similar).  It doesn’t have the nice baby smell, BUT you could add a few drops of your favorite essential oil!

Cloud Dough Recipe

Flour

Baby oil (or canola oil)

Optional:  Essential oil

The ratio is 8:1 flour to oil, but since it still was pretty powdery for a toddler I added some more oil, so my ratio was closer to 6:1.  The batch Ole is playing with is 3 C flour and 1/4 C oil.

I shouldn’t have given him any “tools” to start off with because then he only wanted to scoop it and didn’t want to play with it with his hands!  I know better for next time, so he’ll get more feeling of the texture and working with molding and crumbling it.  A larger plastic container would have been nice, but since it was just for one kid (and one mama to play with too!), we kept it simple.

It might be slightly messy, but it is really fun!  He was entertained with it for so long (like an hour!) and was concentrating hard!  A damp cloth for Olaf and the table and a quick vacuuming for the carpet and cleanup was done!  Alternatively you could put a piece of plastic underneath the play area.

Happy winter days of play!