Cloud Dough

After a doctor checkup, a nap, and a snack, today's activity was playing with cloud dough.  Just in case you've never heard of cloud dough, it's basically a mixture of flour and baby oil.

Here's what you need:

The recipe:
Put 8 cups of flour and 1 cup of baby oil in a large bowl.  I used my largest mixing bowl. Mix it together by hand in the bowl until it reaches a consistency similar to dry sand.  All the baby oil should be mixed in and it shouldn't be wet.  The beauty of cloud dough is that you can mold and shape it without it falling apart, setting it apart from sand.

It was obvious to me that this could get a bit messy, so we took it outside.  It did get everywhere, but it was like getting flour on your clothes.  Not something that could stain clothes but also not an activity you want to conduct just after you'd gotten your kids dressed up to go somewhere.  I used the empty water table so the bowl was at a one-year-old's level and let them use the cups that we use with the water table.

I thought they'd do more sticking their hands in the cloud dough, but they were mostly interested in scooping it in and out of the cups.  Susannah liked putting cloud dough in her cup and then dumping it places, usually on the patio or over the side of the patio.  Max enjoyed tossing the cough dough up.  This meant it usually landed on him in some way, but he was having fun and we were home for the day, so I didn't mind.

Once again, the attention span was short, but everyone had fun.  Most especially our dog (see the background above), who made it her mission to lick every bit of cloud dough up off the patio and the water table.  Hopefully baby oil doesn't harm a doggy's insides.

Cloud dough also seems to keep.  I made our batch on Sunday afternoon (the rain stopped us from using it earlier) and it was perfectly fine today (Friday).  I kept it covered with Glad Press N Seal in the big bowl.