Dough Experiment 6 Jello Playdough

 Jello Playdough

My expired Jello

 

Yikes, it's sticky.  Baby boy isn't going to like that.

Very unfortunate.  I have to clean this up?

 

I'm turning this into chopstick fun. 
That way N doesn't have to touch it with his hands.

The layout so he can pick up the dough with chopsticks

 

Into his front loader, THEN into the bowl

He even wanted to recover it from the ground with the chopsticks. Cute!

 

Choppers!

 

 

Playdough with Jello sounded interesting to me.  It would have a vibrant color, and would smell yummy.  I even had an expired box in the pantry, so I wouldn't be wasting, and it wouldn't even cost me a trip to the grocery store.  Ok, I thought, I'll give it a try.

 

After making it on the stovetop, I discovered it is sticky, quite a bit more sticky than most playdoughs. This is something to keep in mind while considering making it.  The vast majority of toddlers hate having sticky, dirty fingers, some more so than others.  Nick is somewhere in between, but I would say initially this was way stickier than even he would like (it did firm up a bit after setting on the counter for about 20 minutes after being cooked), so I decided to use some kids chopsticks that a friend had given me for Nick.  I hadn't used them before with Nick, because I thought they would be too difficult for him to use (he's 36 months at present), but I figured worse comes to worst I could just show him how to pick up the dough by piercing it.  I want to flat out admit I GREATLY underestimated my child's abilities.  I show him once how to put his fingers in and how to move them up and down and off he went.  He called them "snippers" like scissors, then I told him they were called chopsticks so he renamed them "choppers.". I placed different sized dough balls on a cookie sheet for him to pick up and transfer to a bowl.  Since this was the day after we had done the Mud Dough, he wanted to transfer the dough balls into a front loader with the chopsticks then dump them into the bowl.  He even used the chopsticks to pick up dough that had fallen on the ground.  He loved it.  A cool bonus was that he now loves using them at dinner occasionally too, when the food is the right size.

 

The verdict: I/Nick loved the chopstick aspect of the activity which I would definitely do again.  I think I thought the smell and color of the dough was cool, but honestly Nick probably would have enjoyed the chopstick part with any dough.  I'm not overly keen on using food- food, like Jello or cake mix in playdough. I mean what for? It's wasteful (unless it's expired like the jello and cake mix I used) and for younger kids it can be flat out confusing whether or not it's edible.  Then there was the stickiness factor, less appealing to the child, and parent who has to clean it.  And it turned my wooden spoon pink (i didn't really care that much, but use a metal one if you have one.  And the color won't run or stain anything once it is cooked.  This is true of all doughs and coloring methods, I have found.). 

Bottom line: If you are dying to try something different, go ahead, but there are better ones to do first in my opinion like:

Galaxy Dough

Cloud Dough

Mud Dough

 

Recipe (originally found here)

 

• Flour 1 cup
• Salt 2 tbsps
• Cream of Tartar 2 tbsps
• Cooking oil (canola, vegetable, for example) 2 tbsps
• Water 1 cup
• Packet of jello 1.3 oz (dry, not prepared)

 

Combine all of the ingredients in a large pot and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until it pulls and thickens. Once it has become a big round blob.  Set it on wax paper to cool.  Once it cools, knead it until it has the proper consistency.