My good friend Bethany (and a great teacher!) inspired me to make my own play-dough infused with the wonderful smell of gingerbread! My own children loved playing with it and using cookie cutters to make thier own pretend cookies. I made three batches of the recipe below (for less than $10!) and placed a little gingerbread man into a little plastic container. I made one container for each of my students. This will my Christmas present to them! Along with a cookie cutter and the play-dough, I will wrapping it in a little plastic bag and tie with curly ribbon. I love being able to make something for my own children and my classroom kids at the same time!

This is a great way to incorporate team work, recipe reading and following, and responsibility for cleaning up. Reading and following a recipe is a great way to teach sequencing and the skills of “first, next, last,” which is always a skill needed for any reading lesson. So, not only is making play-dough fun, it is also educational!

GINGER BREAD PLAYDOUGH Recipe
2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup salt
1 tbsp. of each: cinnamon, allspice & ginger (this is a nice dark brown)
2 tbsp. vegetable oil
1 cup water

Mix with a wooden spoon until well mixed. When it is too hard to mix, take out of the bowl and knead on the counter. For an extra special touch, add multicolor glitter. It makes it sparkle nicely! This is a “no-cook” recipe!

Here are some great ideas of how to wrap up and “gift” the play-dough:

First, we made sure that we had all the ingredients.

This is why you “need” to knead the dough. It looks pretty gross during mixing.

Here it is! Isn’t it nice! And it smells so good!

Here are the kids using cookie cutters to make their own things.

These are the cute and cheap containers I found at Wal-Mart. Instead of rolling the dough into a ball, I cut out the shape of a gingerbread man.

Now they are stacked and ready for labels. Click below to print the label which contains the recipe and directions. You can also edit and change it in Microsoft Word and add in your own name.

Gingerbread play-dough labels