Valentine's Day cloud dough
- Vicki Manning
- Feb 14, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 24
I love cloud dough - I love how easy it is to make and the fact that it's really silky and smooth - plus if you use baby lotion you get that lovely baby smell!
We used some cloud dough to make a sweet invitation to play for Valentine's Day.
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Cloud dough is great for squishing, stretching and shaping. It's the ideal material to help little ones develop their manual dexterity and improve fine motor skills.
It's also perfect for STEM learning. It's made using cornflour, so it can be more liquid or solid depending on how it's handled (a non-Newtonian fluid). Cloud dough is great for exploring and testing theories - how it reacts to being manipulated, dropped, etc.
As with any sensory play, handling cloud dough is extremely therapeutic and great for calming down, plus it's a great opportunity for conversations and developing vocabulary.
It's also a great tool to encourage imagination, and when children to express their ideas through creating they learn symbolic thinking (pretending that the dough is something else).
To make this Valentine's daycloud dough you will need:
2 parts cornflour (cornstarch)
1 part baby lotion
a couple of drops of food colouring
Start by putting all the ingredients into a bowl and mixing thoroughly with a spoon.
Once the mixture has come together in a dough, take it out and give it a good knead until it is totally smooth.
If the mixture is a little wet or dry, just adjust the amount of cornflour or baby lotion.
To our valentines cloud dough we added some heart sprinkles and mixed them in. I put this on a tray along with some fake rose petals, lolly sticks, fake roses, a wooden rolling pin and a stamper, and invited my 6 year old to play with it.
He started by stretching the dough (it's wonderfully stretchy!), then balled it up and gave it a good sniff (the smell from the baby lotion is lovely). He then stuck some flowers in it and said it was "for Mummy for Valentine's Day!"
He continued to explore its super malleable squishiness by making patterns on the top, and then experimented with its gluing properties by making a structure using the lolly sticks.
When he had finished playing, we popped it into a ziploc bag and saved it for another day. Cloud dough can be kept for ages this way so you can keep playing with it over and over!
Do you love the idea of sensory play but don't know where to start? Worried about the mess and want to find something a bit easier to clean up? Check out my ultimate guide to sensory play, with tonnes of tips and inspiration.
Have you tried cloud dough? What did you think? Leave a comment below!
