The Imagination Tree

Creative play and learning for kids

Raspberry Jelly Valentine’s Play Dough

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Here’s how to make some delicious raspberry scented no-cook play dough for Valentine’s day, using jelly (jello) crystals for the dye and scent. Add a little glitter and it is totally irresistible to play with!
As you will already know, we make a LOT of play dough and it forms one of our staple play times in this house. You can read all about the benefits of playing with it, plus see some great ideas for play dough tool kits in this post. Recently a twitter friend told me about using jelly crystals to form the colour and scent in the dough and I just had to try it out. (These are Jello powders for US readers!) It turned out wonderfully! No food colouring or flavouring needed as the jelly works perfectly for both sensory ingredients.
Using our extra quick, super simple, 4 minute no-cook play dough recipe, we simply added one sachet of this raspberry jelly powder to the boiling water before we stirred it into the dry ingredients. It smelt wonderful and gave a lovely deep pink colour (from a natural beetroot colouring in the ingredients.) Then we added red glitter and set up a Valentine’s invitation to play!
On the table were: 
heart shaped cookie cutters in various sizes, a variety of ribbons, red glitter shaker, sequins and acrylic crystals and plain and patterned rolling pins.
This activity appealed to my girls hugely, being so very pink, pretty and sparkly! They set about rolling out the dough and cutting out myriads of hearts ready for decorating. I helped Pop with the rolling and we talked about needing enough dough underneath before cutting the shapes, which was something she needed to experience first hand to understand!

Then they experimented with adding patterns using the lovely wooden rolling pins. They felt these with these fingers and tried to describe them.

 Then they decorated them using sequins, sparkles and ribbons, turning them into brooches, cookies and ornaments.

When they finished playing I picked off the embellishments and stored the dough in a zip loc bag where it should stay soft for a few months. I can’t wait to try the other flavours and scents soon!

What they are learning as they play:
Motor Skills: pincer grasp, transferring small objects, squashing and rolling malleable dough
Creative Arts: cutting shapes, decorating with a range of media, combining media, working in 3D, model making
Literacy: descriptive language
Sensory: exploring play materials using all of the senses

Cakie: 4.4
Pop: 2.10
Bean 11 mos

You may also enjoy:
The A-Z of Play Dough Recipes
Valentine’s Day Activities for Kids

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Comments

  4. tracy says

    Can’t wait to make more using jello. We added unsweetened kool aid to our last few batches. It gave us pretty colors and a bit of scent.