Festive Spiced Play Dough

This play dough smells so good, I want to eat it!

Recipe:

• 1 cup of salt
• 1 cup of flour
• a couple of tablespoons of mixed spice
• 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar
• 1 cup of water.
• food colouring

Combine all the dry ingredients together and mix well.  Add the water . Drop the food colouring into the mixture until you have the desired shade you would like.

Then place over a low heat and KEEP STIRRING to produce a nice smooth dough.  An electric hand mixer is great for this part and saves your arm muscles!

When it's nice and thick, take off the heat and transfer onto a sheet of cling film or a plastic container.  When it has cooled enough to handle, knead it until smooth and then leave to cool completely.

Can be stored in an air tight container in the fridge for 1-2 weeks.


I set this out on the table for my little people with some christmas tree cutters of different sizes, some sequins, rollers, rolling pins, etc and allowed them to explore.

They enjoyed decorating the trees and developed their mathematics when talking about positional language and sizes.

Festive Sensory Basket

I had lots of left over decorations after putting our tree up at the weekend, so decided it would be a great sensory resource for the children to play with.  I also found a miniature Christmas tree so they could decorate their own too which kept them occupied for ages!

 

Paper Mache Christmas Tree Decorations

I put in an order for lots of Christmas craft materials at Crafty Crocodiles last week and we made our first Christmas decoration today from some of the bits in the big box that arrived.

These little cardboard christmas trees are great for small children to decorate and because all of my little people are under 2, I did an assisted craft activity with them over 2 days.  First we painted the trees green.  Easy enough you might think?  Well yes I suppose it would be, however I had Amelia (my own daughter) around the table with us who, after 15 seconds, ended up looking like this while I was helping one of the other children with their painting... Lovely!

They didn't take long to finish, so I gave the children some paper and they did some paintings to take home too.

When the children returned today, the Christmas trees were dry and we continued to decorate them using some sparkly fuzzy balls and some foam stars (also from Crafty Crocodiles) and PVA glue.

The end result was these pretty trees ready for the children to hang on their Christmas trees at home.