Have you heard about kinetic sand, moon dough or cloud dough? They are all variations of a similar substance, and each one is great for sensory play. Kinetic sand uses sand as the main ingredient, while what I've seen referred to as both moon and cloud dough use flour as the main ingredient. The best part is you can make them at home!
I have an upcoming Art Playdate that I'm preparing for next Tuesday, so I decided to make some cloud dough for the little ones to play with. I found a simple recipe on Tinkerlab.com that uses 8 cups of flour to 1 cup of oil. I decided I wanted to color my dough, so I included some powder paint pigments as well (you can find these on amazon for around $3 per color).
Ingredients:
8 cups flour
1 cup cooking oil or baby oil
non-toxic powdered paint pigments (optional)
large bowl for mixing
whisker for mixing dry ingredients
Step 1: Mix 8 cups of flour with about 2 tablespoons of paint powder. The paint powder may stain clothes, so you may want to have your child put on a smock or old clothes.
This amount will give you about 1 large bowl full of moon dough. Enough for approximately 2 kids to play with.
Step 2: Pour in 1 cup of oil
Step 3: Mush it all up with your hands. Let your kids help here.
We decided to make a second color. My son's favorite color is yellow, so that's what we chose. The yellow reminded me a little too much of egg yolk...and my son tried to eat it. I used a non-toxic paint pigment, but you still don't want your kids to eat it. Needless to say I wasn't a huge fan of the yellow.
If you are not going to be keeping a close eye on your kids while doing this project I would recommend skipping the color, or perhaps try food coloring. They will have just as much fun with white dough and you can leave them unattended for a longer amount of time!
I took both the colors and put them next to each other in a large plastic bin. The next step would be putting in toys that your kids like: diggers, animals, bugs, little princesses, trucks, molds, etc. The bonus of having two colors is that they will inevitably get mixed together, so in the process of playing with the cloud dough kids will learn about color mixing.
I will update with a pic after I try this out at my upcoming Art Playdate!