This week, Nurturestore, The Imagination Tree and Sunhats and Wellie Boots are hosting the Play Dough Pledge – a week long play dough play date. To join in the fun, all you need to do is try something new with pay dough. Yesterday, I took the pledge and made home made play dough for the first time and it turned out to be the most delightfully soft and wonderful play dough ever. Today, I’m sharing how we played with this gorgeous stuff!

 I set out some kitchen utensils for R (3) to use with our freshly made play dough. We started out with just a few items - a garlic crusher, a potato masher and a potato ricer.

I think this was R’s favourite of all the utensils that we tried. It took all his strength to push the play dough through the holes but he was determined to do it and he was rewarded the longest, wiggliest strings of squishy goo!

The potato masher also proved to be great fun!

R pushed the potato masher down onto the playdough and then counted as he squashed the shapes between his fingers. One “sqaush”! Two, “sqaush”! Three, “squash”! Four….

The garlic crusher was a BIG HIT. R likes to help out in the kitchen and he always wants to use the garlic crusher. Unfortunately he doesn’t quite have the strength yet to crush those tough garlic cloves and he’s always disappointed. Imagine his delight when he tried it with play dough instead!

R thought the ”wobbly purple hair” was very funny! He then added two different colours to the garlic crusher to see what might happen.

When he had finished experimenting with the kitchen utensils, R began to make a play dough face. He used the purple strings from the garlic crusher as eyelashes.

Then he added some hair and a mouth.

Here’s another one that we made together.

R loveed every minute of this play dough session and didn’t stop laughing the entire time. He was so excited to use the cooking utensils and kept running to the kitchen drawers to see what else he could try. He chose a whisk (not very successful) and a meat tenderiser (lots of hammering fun and it left some great patterns in the play dough as well).

As an added bonus for me, clean up was a breeze. I had visions of play dough forever stuck inside the tiny holes of the garlic crusher but because we were using our home made play dough, which is so silky and soft, it just slid right off everything.  This stuff is like teflon! I am officially in love with home made play dough!

 What’s your favourite way to play with play dough?

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