Santino loves helping me with mixing up dough for cookies or muffins. In this case I let him mix up the play dough. I haven't really let him measure the ingredients himself, but I would pour the flour or water in the measuring cup and give him to add to the saucepan. He loved this process! He tried really hard to be careful in pouring everything in the saucepan, and not spill everything on the counter top. He was also very persistent in mixing the ingredients very thouroughly.
I did the stovetop part and asked him to step back. He knows, that the stovetop gets hot and never argues.
The recipe I used this time I found here:
white flour – 1 cup
warm water – 1 cup
salt – 2 tbsp
cream of tartar – 2 tbsp
cooking oil – 2 tbsp
Jello – 1 3oz pack
Even though it claims to be the "best play dough ever", I have to disagree. After I first made it, when the dough was still warm, it was fine, very smooth and soft, very manageable. But after a couple of days in the airtight container in the fridge, the playdough became very very sticky. Very sticky. I have tried to add more flour, but even after adding another cup of flour, the dough remained sticky. I am not sure how much more flour I need to add and what effect on the elacticity it can have.
I wasn't happy with the previous recipe I used because of the salt in the dough. I tried this one, even though there is still salt, I thought I the jello would make it different. But the salt still dried out my skin, and the substance became very sticky and almost impossible to play.
Anyways. I'm not writing here to complaint, just an observation. I saw a few other recipes online, I will try making those soon.
Santino enjoyed playing with it. He helped me make a "dinosaur" out of playdough, pasta and black beans from the sensory tray.
He squished it, poked it, fed it to the dinosaur.
I also used some of it to hold the palm trees I made for Santino out of paper rolls and some construction paper. A great decoration for the "dinosaur train" we built on our "activities table".
