When it comes to making things to keep, I like a dough that is really smooth and clay-like. My recipe for cornstarch clay makes a very smooth and slightly sticky white dough that takes color well. Most recently we used it for a hands-on lesson in color mixing. Using liquid food coloring you can mix small chunks of dough into a range of vibrant hues. Here is how we did it:

Mix up a batch of cornstarch clay (recipe below). Once the clay is cool, divide into seven equal parts. Form into balls, then use your finger to poke a hole in the top of six of them. Place four drops of food color in each as follows:

• four red drops
• three yellow drops, one red drop
• four yellow drops
• four green drops
• four blue drops
• three red drops, one blue drop

Seal the top of each ball back up and let it sit for 10 minutes (or longer, up to overnight if you kept in tupperware) to let the color soak-in (this simply keeps your hands cleaner). Now the fun starts! Smash and roll each ball until the color is evenly mixed and smooth. (I found that the quickest way to do this is to roll the ball between my hands until it mixed–about a minute–but Jasper preferred the smashing method!)

We put them in a circle on a piece of paper and talked about “primary” colors (red/blue/yellow) and “secondary” colors (orange/green/purple). We then cut small, equally sized chunks of primary colors and blended them together to make secondary colors. Look, they are the same as the big balls we made with food coloring!

Next, we mixed “tertiary” colors (red-orange, orange-red, orange-yellow, yellow-green, green-blue, blue-violet, and red-violet) by combining small, equally-sized chunks of each primary color with the secondary colors on either side. These made some gorgeous colors!

I don’t have a picture of this, but we had the best time smashing the colors together in a big, circular rainbow, then rolling all the colors together until we had the most stormy grey color you can imagine. Quite a remarkable experiment!

Cornstarch Clay:

Ingredients

• 2 c baking soda
• 1 c cornstarch
• 1 1/4 c water

Method:

• Combine ingredients in a medium saucepan.
• Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until it begins to look like mashed potatoes.
• Immediately remove from heat, let cool a bit, and knead to form a ball. (Be careful not to overcook or it gets lumpy and hard).

(Recipe from Look at Me: Creative Learning Activities for Babies and Toddlers by Carolyn Haas-Buhai)

When she’s not chasing her three little ones around, Amanda shares stories about creating with her kids at www.kiddio.org, and ideas for thrifty, sustainable living at www.housemade.org