How To Make Cornstarch Play-Doh

I’m not a huge fan of play-doh. It gets into your carpet and dries out, it’s stinky and it seems like I can never get it out from under my kid’s fingernails. My kids, on the other hand, LOVE it! Needless to say I’m always on the lookout for play-doh alternatives! A friend of mine from one of our play groups mentioned making my own foam dough with shaving cream. I came home and looked it up on Early Activities & Projects and thought, what the heck? Let’s give it a whirl! It really was a simple activity to put together and my kids spent about THREE hours playing with it.

It worked really well with all of our little molds and cookie cutters, plus we were able to make “blocks” out of it and build a castle. I didn’t get any pictures since I was the main constructor of that one and my one year old thought it was super fun to mash it up as were finishing putting it all together). It was not like play-doh in that we tried to dry out a couple of the shapes we made and they just crumbled and fell apart. But clean up was an easy task and the kids have already been asking when we are going to make it again.

You need:

1 can shaving cream (not the gel kind)

1 box corn starch

Dump your box of cornstarch in to a large bowl (we used a small plastic wash tub from the dollar store).

Pile about half of the can of shaving cream on top of the cornstarch.

Dig in with your hands and start mixing them together! (This was my eight year olds favorite part!) It doesn’t quite come to a playdough consistency but you can tell it’s ready when you can make a ball in the palm of your hands and it stays together pretty well.

Let your kids go to town! We used all sorts of little molds and cookie cutters, toy cars and trucks, small plastic animals and dinosaurs, rolling pins and of course our hands to make all kinds of shapes and tracks in the foam dough. My kids played with the dough in the wash tub that we made it in and I also spread out some wax paper for them to build on too.

When we were done we stored it in an airtight container for a few days. I threw it away when the dough stopped sticking together when we molded it.

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