Green Play Dough

Green Play Dough for St. Patrick’s Day!

Also Known as “Shamrock Play Dough”

We made this Easy Recipe Play Dough for part of our St. Patrick’s Day activities. Kids love to play with all kinds of cool textures, especially the squishy and moldable kinds.

Kids are curious how things are made. Making this as a class demonstration would interest children. While the dough is cooling read a book about St. Patrick’s Day.

Online Books

We used the Shamrock Play Dough as part of our engineering a leprechaun trap. Here are the two books we recommend:

The Night Before St. Patrick’s Day

This book was the inspiration for our STEMHAX Book Companion Packet. Here is an online reading of the book.

How to Trap a Leprechaun

This online reading is by the Storyteller over at Kid Time Story Time. If you can catch a leprechaun he will grant you a wish. This book will keep the kids attention and perhaps some fun ideas they can create with their play dough.

Shannon & the World’s Tallest Leprechaun

Shannon is a young girl who is about to enter into an Irish step dancing contest when she breaks a shoe. Liam is the world’s tallest leprechaun. Will he grant her wishes? Is he really a leprechaun? The Storyteller read this one aloud, too!

Making Play Dough

This is how we made our play dough…

Materials List:

1 1/2 cups Flour
1/2 cup Salt
2 TBS Cream of Tartar
1 TBS Oil
1 tsp Green Food Coloring
1 cup Boiling Water
Sauce Pan or Kettle
Large Bowl
Spoon

Method:

In a large bowl, mix together: FLOUR, SALT, CREAM OF TARTAR and OIL with spoon.
Boil water in a sauce pan or kettle (CAUTION: Have an adult handle the boiling water.)
Add green food coloring to the hot water.
Add the green water to the bowl and mix well with a spoon.
Let the play dough cool.
Remove play dough and have fun!

We used this play dough recipe to build the ladder on our Leprechaun Trap. There are so many educational uses for this recipe. One suggestion is that kids can make letters of the alphabet and practice spelling some of the words that go with St. Patrick’s Day. Some of these words are found in our companion and activity packet for “St. Patrick’s Day!” as a digital download is available in our TpT Store.