Home made play #2: Cloud dough

For7 year olds, regular dough doesn't cut it. They'll play with it for a while but then meh...

Evan also loves creating reactions. I think it began when we blew up Coca Cola in the backyard. He loves the little experiment kits that create lots of foaming and possibly heat or extreme cold as well.

So I decided to make 'cloud dough'. Cloud dough has the consistency of wet sand. It clumps together quite nicely but at the same time, it falls apart with just a little bit of pressure. But the best part about this recipe is that we can cause it to bubble and foam dramatically with the addition of vinegar.

It's basically
1. 1 part of flour to 1 part of baking soda. (I went by cups- 1 cup to 1 cup)
2. 1/4 cup of oil.
3. Food colouring to make it pretty.
And combine.

And to make it bubble and boil,
1. Vinegar (as much or as little as you can spare)
2. Syringes and droppers.

I also gave them kitchen toys to play with. Muffin was intent on making cup cakes. The twins were trying to figure out how much 'sand'/ 'dough' they could stuff into the containers. And at 7, a large part of their play involved toilet humour which I shall not repeat here.

Eventually, I took out the vinegar and after explaining to them how the vinegar who react to the baking soda, I set them free. First, they started small. They dripped drops of vinegar into segments of cloud dough and it started to foam. Eventually, we got to the point where entire bowls of vinegar were dumped into the dough and it erupted, foamed, bubbled and hissed with a life of its own. They played with the cold sludge after that and created real muck out of it.

Like the dough and vinegar mixture, they erupted into peels of excited laughter which brought about the kids on the level. By this point, I  pretty much left them to their own screamy devices and retreated into the house to read a book.

My only problem with this is that the batch you make pretty much goes out with the trash that very night. It's a non-renewable play thing. 

Evan has asked me to do it again. I told him we would but he had to go with me to buy more bicarb.