Homemade Playdough for Letter Review

Every Friday we review our letters and numbers that we've learned since beginning Oak Meadow. This is a bit different than the way it goes if  you are following OM K properly. In the curric, there's only one letter a week. You do that for three weeks, and then you do an entire week of review. We followed the curriculum that way through letter D when my kid decided that she was ready to speed things up a bit. She was getting bored and forgetting her letters because there was so much time between each one. Every child is different. Some wouldn't even need the sped up version of intro that we are doing. Some might need more time in between. I like that the OM K curric is flexible enough that I can do a week in one day now and not feel like we're missing out on too much.

This week we ended with J and 6. I promised that we would make our own clay to do review. Friday, however, ended up all crazy due to illness so it wasn't until Friday night that I was able to make the clay. I was going to make a simple salt dough, but this recipe for homemade playdough had been tempting me for awhile.

After a few moments of debating, I went with the new (to me) recipe (if only because I didn't feel like dragging out the paints for the other dough). I got out the pot and spoon, called my D1 out of her room, and we got to mixing. It wasn't until we'd started that I realized we only had about 1/4 cup of salt left in the house! My husband ran out to get some for us. Meanwhile we finished putting everything else in the pot. I doubled the recipe and used gel food coloring to make it super brilliant.

This what it looked like while we waited for the salt:

This is what it looked like right before I started cooking it:

I thought cooking it would be a lot like making a choux pastry, but I soon realized that keeping it smooth would be almost impossible. The only real objectives that I found necessary were constant stirring to keep from burning and getting all the moisture out. It wasn't at all pretty when I dumped it on the wax paper to cool, but by the time I finished kneading it, it was the softest, loveliest playdough I've ever touched. By the way, I used coconut oil, which I think has made it quite soft without the need for baby oil some have recommended .

And here are some of the letters that D1 made (she picked out the color, btw) on Saturday morning:

I definitely recommend this dough and agree with the idea that it would make an excellent present for just about any child (and some adults!).