The Play Jar

Over at Chasing Cheerios there's a great post about creating an Art Jar.  I really liked this idea and decided to steal it borrow it for our own activities.  And the "Play Jar" was born!

(It's actually more like a Play Goldfish Bowl, but just go with me here, ok?)

I expanded just a bit on it and added activities like:

• Painting our nails
• Going for a walk
• Playing in the backyard
• Going to the park
• Playing with puzzles

I also added some arts and crafts activities from these books:

We'll pick an activity out at breakfast and that's the activity we'll do the next day.  (That way if I have any prep work to do, I have some time to prepare!)  We've done a few activities from the jar already like mosaic artwork, playing a game, but the one we really had fun with was the salt dough clay. 

My original intention was to make beads that Nani could paint and string into necklaces.  That was a huge bust.  No matter how big I made the holes, they closed up during baking.  Out of the 4 dozen or so beads I made, I was only able to salvage about 12.

So, I had a bunch of leftover dough and didn't want to make any more beads, so I let Nani go to it with cookie cutters.  (I would have had pictures of this project, but remember that my camera card decided to go all tempermental on me!  I did get some pictures of the painting though.)

We made princess crowns, glass slippers, a castle (which was a haunted house cookie cutter.  We made two and I attached them together!), a pumpkin carriage, and then we did the girls' handprints.

Here's the recipe:

Self-Hardening Salt Clay:

1 1/2 C salt
4 C flour
1 1/2 C water

1.  Mix the dry ingredients together in a plastic bowl; then add water gradually
2.  Knead dough well, adding water as needed until you get a smooth ball of dough
3.  To bake clay, set oven to 300 F and bake small shapes for 30-40 min. until hard.  (For cookie cutter shapes, I found that 45-50 min. did the trick)

Have fun!