Clubhouse Salt Dough Stars

After making our water bead Flag, we decided to dive right in to another patriotic activity to celebrate Independence Day.

First, how about a fun fact? The original 13 stars on the United States flag were to be white, on a blue background, to represent "a new constellation". So that's why there are stars on the U.S. Flag!! Who knew today's activity would turn into an astronomy lesson? :)

Now on to the actual activity. Salt dough. There are a few different recipes for this, but for us what always works is equal parts of all ingredients. For this activity, we mixed 1 cup of flour, 1 cup of salt, and 1 cup of water.

Once we had our dough ready to go, we rolled it out and used our star shaped cookie cutter to make our stars.

At this point I had to keep explaining to the Clubhouse Kids that we were not, in fact, making cookies. They weren't buying it, especially when I said it was time to bake our stars :D

Since I knew we would be using ribbons to hang our stars, I wanted each star to have a little hole. We used a large straw to poke the holes out of the dough.

Most recipes call for you to bake this dough at a temperature of around 100 degrees, until it hardens. Since it was 104 degrees outside, we let the Sunshine do the baking.

Outside in the Sun for a few hours, the stars completely hardened. I gave each Clubhouse Kid their stars, and corresponding paint colors. I added a few drops of corn syrup to each color, so that the colors would dry shiny. We have had a lot of fun painting with corn syrup in the past, the results are always nice and shiny!





"These stars got really hard."

This is when they accepted they had not just made cookies.

This is also when I decided we had better bake cookies soon,  it's been awhile since they've been able to eat their hard work ;)

They got right to painting...

Once the stars were dry, we added some ribbons and made our Patriotic decor.






Here's to the Red, White and Blue!

Ms. Liz