When you think about Valentine’s do you think about hearts and chocolate? I do! and this year we have been taking my love of chocolate up one notch! I made chocolate scented playdough for the kids in class.
I wanted the playdough to be soft and easy to handle so I use the base of my softest playdough EVER recipe and added some chocolate.
because the chocolate turns like chocolate milk when combined with water this recipe called for extra flour. If you find it sticky all you need is extra flour until it has the texture you want. And honestly, we could not be happier with the result of this recipe.
Playdough is not just fun, it is an important play ingredient to work on fine motor skills. For what I have seen around 18months you can start playing with this material at home.
how to make chocolate scented playdough
Chocolate Scented Playdough
Ingredients
- 4 cups of flour (1 cup extra to sprinkle in case)
- 2 cup of Boiling Water
- 1 cup of salt
- ½ cup of cocoa powder
- 4 Tsp Cream of Tartar
- 4 Tbs oil (I used olive oil)
- Food coloring If you want the playdough red - if not it will be brown like chocolate
Instructions
- Using a bowl add all of the dry ingredients and mix well. Flour, salt, cocoa powder, and cream of tartar
- On a separate bowl mix the food coloring and boiling water.
- Mix the dry ingredients, the oil, and colored boiling water and mix with a spatula.
- Once the water cools down a bit, you can start kneading the dough.
- When you have a good consistency, add some flour onto your cutting board and knead some more. If the dough sticks to your fingers it needs more flour. Add a little bit at a time to not dry the dough. If you dry it by mistake, just add a little bit of water.
Benefits of playing with playdough
Enhances fine motor skill
What are fine motor skills? are all those little hand moc your child squishes, rolls, flattens, shapes, scores or cuts play dough, he develops and strengthen his hand muscles. The strengthened hand muscles helps improve fine motor skills of your child
Improves pre-writing skills
When your child plays with play dough, his pincer grip (the squeezing of pointer finger and thumb to grasp an object) improves. An improved pincer grip enhances your child’s pre-writing skills
Creativity and imagination
Play-dough provides your child with unlimited possibilities of moulding the dough into food, animals, decorations, flowers etc. Thereby, it encourages your child to use his imagination and inspires his creativity. If your child uses various shapes, rolling pins and other tools while playing with play dough it further improves his creative imagination.
Calming effect
Is your child often restless and finds it difficult to express his emotions? Give him some play dough to play. Sitting at one place and squishing and squashing of play dough will have a very calming and soothing effect on him. It will also provide him with great option to express his emotions
Develops hand – eye coordination
Use of variety of shapes and rolling pins while playing with play-dough will improve your child’s hand-eye-coordination
Social skills
When your child plays with play-dough along with other siblings or you they will interact, talk, discuss problems and find solutions to creating great works of art and craft with play dough. Thus, playing with play dough will enhance your child’s social skills
Increases curiosity and knowledge
When your child mixes 2 different colour dough together and discover a new colour or when he learns to mould play dough in different shapes, it encourages his curiosity and he will ask various questions which would help increase his knowledge and help overall development So the next time your child requests you to play with play dough, not only encourage him, participate in his play along with him to help him learn the most from use play-dough.
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