The Best Play Dough Recipe Ever - IMHO!

Four years ago I came across this amazing blog & their recipe for outdoor play dough on this blog: Exploring the Outdoor Classroom & I just had to try it. We had had terrible trouble making our play dough last in our new school as the underfloor heating seemed to make it dry up after a few days & become too crumbly to use. Usually it would last a month but we found ourselves having to throw it out at the end of each week & were constantly making new batches. I have of course since discovered that our damp climate does not lend itself to having play dough outdoors - it just goes all sticky so this outdoor recipe has become our staple indoor dough recipe with some adaptations.

Each month we make new play dough, using the a colour we want to reinforce or a particular scent etc. and so far four years on, this is still working for us, best of all we can set the play dough out first thing and it is still soft and ready for use when we come inside to play after 45 minutes. And even after a month when we make a new batch, we can pass the old one to another class in the school and it's good for at least another month or so.

The original outdoor recipe is much too 'wet' so we have combined our indoor and the outdoor recipes to make the perfect, soft, pliable dough.

This month we added cinnamon & All Spice to make gingerbread play dough - the smell is heavenly and the children have enjoyed making gingerbread men & stars and buns with little coloured discs as buttons or decorations.