So I’ve been busy trying to think of some kind of Christmas playdough that I could make with my son and last week inspiration came to me, as it often does, fueled by caffeine. I was sat in Starbucks (my second home) and the red cups were calling me. Not to drink, obviously. They wanted to be blog props. Uh-huh. I figured that I could probably work out how to make some gingerbread latte play dough and hurry I did and oh my goodness it was ace!
Last week in Tuesday Tutorials MulticraftingMummy linked up a really cool post called ‘We’re going on a P hunt‘ where she used water beads. I’ve never used then before so thought it might be fun to try out ourselves. Being water beads an ocean sensory play tub seemed the best idea for an easy introduction to using them!
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This week both my kids have been ill so while my daughter slept it off I wanted to do a simple activity with my son that he could still enjoy while feeling a bit under the weather. He adores playdoh so I thought that this rose scented playdough might be a fun introduction to making our own scented ones.
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So with The Husband working this weekend and me stuck for ideas I thought it might be a nice idea to set up a monster play dough invitation to play for my son. This is the first ‘proper’ invitation to play I’ve done so far and we had a bit of a wobbly start but as you’ll see it turned out really well!
I’ve always been a bit….wobbly about the idea of an invitation to play because, well, kids do just play don’t they?! But then I thought the other day about how I view things, about how you could show me a dress in Marc Jacobs and I’d love you FOREVER if you bought it for me, but show me the same dress crumpled in the bottom in my wardrobe and I’d probably cry because I have nothing to wear. Likewise, my son is a ‘discerning’ eater, but give him a bento inspired lunch and it’s happy faces all round.
With this in mind monster play dough seemed a good place to start because he adores play dough and I figured I probably had enough ‘stuff’ for a monster set up!
What I included:
Googly eyes
Pipe cleaners
Play dough (ours is a gorgeous neon set but we are totally colour mixers here so it’s now green)
Pasta dyed black
A monster shaped cutter
Craft sticks
The tray that I placed it in is actually a leftover tray from one of those Tesco’s fruit selections. Recycling in action!
If you haven’t dyed pasta before, all you do is pop it in a bowl, add some food dye, wiggle it around a bit and then leave it out to dry. I found the drying took longer than it does with rice so this is a good one to prep the night before or if your kids are in preschool at all.
At first my son was a bit hesitant but after a bit of coaxing he was really into it, especially when he realised that his play dough monsters could be new villains to fight Batman! My husband came home while we were playing and he loved it too, all of us inventing new characters, it was loads of fun!
I think I’ll have to try a few more invitations to play, maybe some more Halloween inspired ones! If you’ve tried it with your kids do let me know how it went, I always love to share ideas with people!
As you can imagine, I read the blogs of my fellow Tuesday Tutorials hosts pretty often and when I saw Anna’s Cinnamon and Ginger scented cloud dough last week I knew that it was something I wanted to try with my son.
Being me though I knew that I wanted to try something a little bit different so this weekend we made this gorgeous peppermint scented cloud dough!
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