Discover Simple Play Dough Recipes to Make at Home

Making play dough is one of my favorite parenting hacks. Over the years, I have made it several times both as an educator and as a parent. It is way easier than you might think, and best of all, uses things you likely already have at home. It is also a great activity for all ages of kids. My toddler and tween equally love when I make it.

In this post, I will cover

• Simple recipes
• Variations
• Fun activities to do as a family

I hope that through this post you will come to love making play dough as much as I do!

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Simple Recipes

There are so many play dough recipes out there it can quickly get overwhelming. When I think about homemade play dough, I tend to think of 3 types: basic recipes, edible recipes, and cloud dough.

Basic play dough

This is the recipe I make most often: 

• 2 cups flour
• ½ cup salt
• 2 tablespoons cream of tartar
• 1 ½ tablespoons of oil
• 1 ¼ cup boiling water
• Food coloring

All you do is mix all of the ingredients in a pot over medium heat and mix until you have a dough like consistency. With this recipe, you can add food coloring at the beginning or end, whichever you prefer. For this make, I wanted different colors. Therefore, I divided the dough into 4 balls, put an indent in each, added food coloring, then mixed until it was fully mixed in.

There are many recipes out there that are “no cook,” but I’ve never been able to make these work.

Edible play dough

Of course, the recipe above is totally taste-safe for toddlers and young children. The benefit of the simple recipe is that should your child eat it, it doesn’t taste good, so they tend to stop. On the other hand, I cannot promise this for these recipes.

Edible play dough has become a big thing in the past few years. Therefore, I have included a few edible recipes you may want to try out. 

• Edible marshmallow play dough from Team Cartwright
• Kool-Aid play dough from The Best Ideas for Kids
• Edible frosting play dough from The Craft At Home Family

Cloud dough

Cloud dough is similar to play dough, but tends to be a lot softer. It is also NOT taste safe, so you will need to monitor your children a little closer when using this. Since all you need for this recipe is lotion (preferably unscented) and cornstarch, it’s easy enough to make last minute. You can also use food coloring if you would like. For this recipe, you mix a 2 to 1 ratio of cornstarch to lotion. Learn more at The Purposeful Nest. 

Variations

The best thing about play dough is how versatile it is. Therefore, you can add all kinds of things to it to make it more interesting and fun. For example, add glitter to it like I did for our Arctic fun activities.

Educational Idea: As you’re mixing colors into the play dough, consider making colors like green by mixing 2 other colors together. This not only helps your child learn about the color wheel, but also cause and effect (for example, the cause is mixing yellow and blue and the effect is getting green).

I also really love this galaxy play dough idea from Kids Activities Blog that adds glitter, cut out stars, and food coloring to get a galaxy effect. 

I have also added scents and spices to play dough in the past to make it more interesting and relevant to what we are learning about. For example, when I was a Kindergarten teacher, I once made orange play dough with pumpkin pie spice for our Fall unit. It was really cool, but resulted in lots of kids eating it (luckily it was taste-safe). 

Educational Idea: In addition to adding things to it, you could use this to discuss the 5 senses. It would be super cool to make something like peppermint play dough that is a weird color, like yellow. Then have your child smell it and predict what they think it looks like. Then once they see that it looks different than they were expecting, you can talk about how your senses work together to make sense of the world. When we smell peppermint, we expect to see red and white or green depending on what we associate it with.

Fun Activities To Do as a Family

Now that you have your play dough made, what are you going to do with it? My kids absolutely love using it to make things. As such, they most often imagine it to be food and make things for me to “eat.” Therefore, using something like this play dough kit really lets their imagination go wild!

STEM Marble Run

Play dough can also be used as a great STEM material. In order to do this, I recently challenged my kids to make a marble run using our play dough. It was a ton of fun and challenged them each in very different ways. We used these marbles since they have different sizes so I didn’t have to give my toddler who puts everything in her mouth a small marble.

Educational Idea: Talk to your child about gravity. In order for a marble run to work, it relies on gravity. Where it starts has to be higher than where it ends, otherwise the marble won’t move.

Homemade Play Dough Kits

Lately I have been seeing a lot of ideas around play dough kits. This is something relatively new to me and that I am very much still exploring.

For this post, I decided to try my hand at making my own kit centered around some jungle animals we had lying around. I’ve even included a free printable so you can replicate it (see below)! First, I provided my kids with a basic mat that had a jungle background. By doing this, it allowed them to use their imagination. Additionally, by providing a variety of materials, they were able to explore how they all interacted with the play dough.

Then, to up the educational aspects, I decided to add a few things that focused on the skills of counting and color sorting. Therefore, one mat has colorful jungle animals for my toddler to sort play dough onto. The other has numbers 1-10 with leaves. The idea here is they roll a ball of play dough for each leaf and then as they count the leaves, they smash the play dough. In order to ensure the play dough didn’t stick, I put the mats in a plastic bag. You could also use sheet protectors.

Educational Idea: The educational possibilities here are endless. You could work on counting or sorting like I explain above. They could also practice letters and/or words by building them with play dough. You could study animals by using the play dough to observe their footprints (see my Arctic animals post) or building habitats.

Let’s Wrap It Up

Through this post, I hope I was able to show you that making your own play dough is a fun and simple idea you can do at home with your kids today. It is so easy and versatile that you can really make it meet your needs – whether just to have fun or add in some educational concepts! Try it out and comment below to let me know how it went.

Here is a consolidated list of the materials I used for this post:

• Flour
• Salt
• Cream of tartar
• Oil
• Food coloring
• Glitter
• Play dough kit
• Marbles