Saturday, July 7, 2012

Making a Play Park with Play Dough

We love going to the play park and have already spent many sunny days playing on swings and slides and climbing over climbing frames this summer. So I wasn’t really surprised when our play dough became a play park one rainy afternoon. I was inspired by Puttisworld to try some construction with cocktail sticks and play dough. I was hoping to talk about squares and triangles, but imagination took hold and we ended up with a mini play park.

This is our recipe for play dough:
2 cups flour
½ cup salt
2 tbsp oil
1 ½ cup boiling water
Squeeze of lemon juice
Generous splash of red food colouring


I adapted this from one I found on The Imagination Tree where you can find many recipes and wonderful ideas for play dough play.


So, we started with this:
Pink Play Dough and Cocktail Sticks
And ended up with swings:

Play Dough Swings


A slide:

Play Dough Slide


Balancing bars:

Play Dough Balancing Bars


And an interesting climbing frame:

Play Dough Climbing Frame


Actually, I did most of the design work and B made interesting shapes with the dough (the climbing frame is all his) but we had a great conversation while working with the play dough and I hope I sparked his creativity for the possibilities of play dough.


2 comments:

  1. Wow Love the playdough play park! And your playdough recipe does not use cream of tartar, which is a biy expensive... guess we will be trying ur recipe next time.

    Thanks for the link love.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cream of tartar is not in my local supermarket, and I haven't got round to going to another shop yet. I read somewhere that lemon juice is a suitable alternative, so tried it. I still want to try the cream of tartar as I'm not totally happy with this recipe, but it works for now!

      Delete