Salt Dough Recipe and Activities

Salt Dough Recipe and Activities

Salt dough makes a great activity for young children, especially on these chilly November days.  It also gives us a good way to prepare for Christmas, as Advent starts this Sunday.  We made Christmas ornaments with salt dough, hand and foot prints, and even a Nativity scene that we are still working on.

Here is the recipe I use:

2 cups of white flour

1 cup of salt

1 cup of hot tap water

Mix all the ingredients together until it forms a stiff dough.  Turn onto a lightly floured surface and kneed for 5 minutes.  (My children think it is fun if I set a kitchen timer for them while they kneed).

Roll out dough to desired thickness.  We used cookie cutters to cut out the shapes we wanted for our ornaments and for our Nativity scene.  You can also use this dough for other modeling projects or even play dough if you added color.  Place dough on cookie sheets and put in the oven at 200 degrees for several hours.  This is a good project if you are going to be home most of the day.  My thicker 1/2 inch pieces for the Nativity scene took nearly four hours to dry and harden.  Once the dough is completely dry and hardened, remove from oven and cool.  If you are making ornaments, be sure to poke a hole in them at the top with a straw, so you can tie a hanger to them for the tree.  We painted ours with a mixture of food coloring and water, but you could get much more creative and use acrylic paints, sparkles, etc.  Since my oldest is only three and a half I wanted her to be able to participate, without it being a total disaster!

I got my Nativity scene cookie cutters through Leaflet Missal.  I think they were only around $10.00 for the whole set.

Here's what you will need.

Let's get busy!

 Salt dough

 My three-year old loving this!

 Even my two-year old was able to paint some.

 We plan on gluing the figures to a stable made of craft sticks.  Hot glue should work well, but right now the kids want to play with the figures and don't want me to glue them, so we'll see!

 We had some extra dough leftover, so I decided to do hand prints and the baby's foot print as keepsakes.  These can be labeled with Sharpie or painted.  Fun way to remember how cute and tiny our children are.

  I use Dixie cups for mixing a small amount of water and several drops of food color for painting.  It's a great substitute for paint with preschoolers and toddlers.