Homemade Sand Playdough

 The spring weather is so confusing for Daven.  Over the weekend he got to play outside as much as he wanted.  But now it's cold again and yesterday we had all day snow flurries!   He kept mentioning wanting to play in his sandbox, so I decided to find a way to bring the sand inside.  The first thing I thought of was a playdough with sand in it.  Can it be done?  Of course it can!

There were actually quite a few different mixes and recipes to chose from.  I went with the most basic one I could find.  I wanted Daven to be involved in every step of the process if possible, and when you have to use the stove to mix and melt and boil, that takes some of this away.

The recipe that I used came from the blog, Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning.  If you click the link, it will take you directly to their site and their post about sand playdough.  This site is authored by Sherry Hutton and Donna Ridley-Burns with the aim to help educators make learning fun.  These ladies are awesome!  I will be bookmarking their page and visiting back often for more ideas.

Here's all you need:
4 cups sand
3 cups flour
1/4 cup oil (We used vegetable oil but I'm pretty sure that any kind would work just fine)
1 cup water (We needed to add more to fully mix our dough)

This makes a huge batch of dough, and it was so much fun!  What I loved about Irresistible Ideas is that Sherry and Donna also gave a single serving recipe, so that if you wanted to use this in the classroom, every child could mix up and customize their own special batch! 

First we mixed the sand and flour together.

Then we added to liquids.  Oddly enough, I don't have any pictures of this.  But I trust you all to be able to figure that one out.  We also added a few drops of vanilla scented oil to the mix. 

When we were at the craft store earlier that afternoon so I could pick up some yarn, I let Daven pick a glitter that we could add to our dough.  He chose purple.  Just a warning - the glitter gets everywhere!  But it adds so much to the project.

After the mixture was completely formed, I separated the batch into four chunks.  We got a set of cheap plastic containers at the Dollar Tree so that we could store our creation in.  This allowed us to do something different with each one.

We found a few stamps in my craft box and Daven pressed away.  In this picture, he is using eighth notes.  "Look, mommy!  I made music in this dough!"  Melts my heart!

We had so much fun with the purple glitter that I found more glitter and let him have at it. 

I already had some of these glass stones from a previously failed craft project, but you can pick these up at the Dollar Tree as well.  They look really neat pressed in the dough and they also magnify the glitter underneath. 

Red was the last glitter color that we had.  And he shook the container until all the glitter was out!

Here's our pizza!  If I remember correctly, the toppings included pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives, pineapple and extra cheese. 

What better to go with pizza than bread sticks!  Daven cut them into strips and then handed them to me.

When it was time to get ready to go to nana and papaw's house for dinner, we put our dough away and closed the containers tight.  We left one glitter-free for now.  I had to put Daven in the tub and I had my change my clothes.  But hear this: getting messy was worth it!