Cloud Dough DIRT

We brought the dirt inside on this cold day with Cloud Dough DIRT! That’s right! We got messy INSIDE and it was a blast! Here is all of the fun ideas we came up with to play with our dirt. We did this during the “punchy” evening hour before bath and bedtime.

You will need:
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup cocoa powder
MIX!

Want to make Cloud Dough in other colors? It’s super easy!
Don’t use the cocoa powder.
Use 1/2 cup of oil and color it with food coloring. Then, mix with 3 cups of flour. Wallah!

We got together our favorite construction trucks and put our dirt in the Flisat table. We pretended cinnamon sticks were logs and our trucks needed to haul the logs off the land.

Miss 4 liked using the tractor backhoe to scoop and pour while Mr. 1 was happy with just a spoon. She scooped the dirt into the cement truck and shook it up, pushed the dirt with the tractor bucket into a hill and gathered logs. We spread out the dirt and drove each truck through it to see the different tracks that each truck made.

They made a road with the cinnamon sticks and we talked about traction. Miss 4 pretended the tractor got stuck in the mud and they needed another truck to pull him out.

The dough clumps up if you squeeze it which feels really cool and makes for really easy clean-up when you’re done. The cocoa flour doesn’t come out of carpet well so make sure you have something down to catch any messes.

Miss 4 kept asking for more stuff to use to build a house. I gave her cinnamon sticks, popsicle sticks, some bark and sticks from our Frozen Nature Discovery, bottle caps and an empty playdough container. She took it upon herself to grab the plastic bag. To us, it might look like a bunch of stuff thrown onto chocolate dirt but to her, the cinnamon sticks under the dough were water pipes, the bottle caps were lights, the plastic bag was a window, the bark was a wall, etc. I was super impressed with her creativity. She kept calling the bark her “barf” which totally made me laugh out loud.

This type of activity nurtures imagination. “Playing pretend” is not just for fun, it’s learning! They learn cognitive skills, fine motor skills, social skills, turn-taking, and solving problems. We talked about the 5 senses and even tasted our dirt! The first thing Miss 4 said was “it smells like chocolate!”

Have fun and GET MESSY! There is SO much fun to be had with CLOUD DOUGH DIRT!