Make these all natural fruit play dough recipes for sensory play with young children! A great follow up to our natural dyes for play dough article and a lovely way to combine the natural scents with natural colouring too.
The play dough archives just keep on getting bigger and bigger here on the blog! Recently I wrote about our all natural dyes for play dough, plus a fun matcha green tea post here too.
This time I have re-visited some fruit play dough ideas that we tried a few years ago and combined them with a couple of new flavours to create a new post with them all in one place.
Soon I will create a MEGA collection of everything we have ever made (at least 50+ !) and that will be a great one-stop place for you to find all the info you ever need for play dough making fun!
HOW TO MAKE NATURAL FRUIT PLAY DOUGH
With my littlest one afternoon recently we set about to make 6 batches of fruit play dough together.
It’s very easy to make these natural fruit play dough variations. All you need are some fresh fruits and the usual ingredients for my 4-minute, no cook play dough recipe (click the link to find the easy how-to!)
After making a batch of plain play dough, add 1-2 teaspoons of freshly squeezed juice and knead it throughly until no longer sticky at all. Add a small sprinkling of plain flour if needed.
For the raspberry and blackberry variations we crushed 3 small fruits and added them to the dough itself at the final stage. Pips, pulp and all! This made interesting textures but also beautiful natural colouring.
When making the lime, clementine and lemon variations add a couple of teaspoons of freshly grated zest to the dough in the final stages. This really makes the scent incredible!
In order to keep these as natural as possible, we either didn’t add any colour at all or used some of our natural dyes, which you can read about from our previous post here.
We made:
Clementine Play Dough
Juice + zest
Lime Play Dough
Juice + zest
Lemon Zest Play Dough
Juice + zest
Raspberry Play Dough
3 x mashed raspberries
Blackberry Play Dough
3 x crushed blackberries
Coconut Play Dough
This variation was made in a different way which resulted in this bright white, creamy and exotically scented dough! Using this super simple 2 ingredient method from my previous coconut play dough post, plus the addition of some desiccated coconut for interest and texture too!
This isn’t the first time we’ve experimented with making fruity play dough varieties and we will absolutely come back to them again as they smell so amazing!
If you haven’t tried yet I really encourage you to give it a go, as well as trying the Autumn spice, herb, gingerbread, chocolate and lavender versions too! All are so evocative of different seasons and can have wonderfully calming and focusing effects as the kids play.
Play dough continues to be and will ALWAYS be my number one favourite play material for kids of ALL ages!
The nature of these fresh and natural fruit play dough recipes means that they contain some pulp and zest. Of course they won’t then last as long as regular play dough for this reason.
However, you can wrap them and store them in the fridge to keep them as long as possible. My guess would be 1-2 weeks maximum. The AMAZING scent is worth it for the sensory play benefits!
Find the FULL Sensory Play activity archives here.
Find the FULL Play Dough Recipe Collection here.
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