Homemade Gingerbread Playdough

Christmas fun is in full swing around here. A week ago we had Jingle Jam at our church, which is the kids' Christmas program. It was a ton of fun. The girls were part of the 150-kid Jingle Jam Carolers, and that was cool. They did 'Silent Night' and a jazzed up version of 'Joy To the World.'

Here the girls are in front of the stage in the main auditorium. They do a different set for each sermon series and they are always amazing. It's (almost) all made from styrofoam. Wow.

Waiting for the show to start.

Getting ready to sing

Silent night...looked so pretty with all their star lights.

Now onto the blog post title. Homemade gingerbread playdough! I saw this post and thought it'd be a fun project to do in Brooke's class. I wanted to do it in cute jars but a)jars are expensive, b)I didn't have enough old jars of my own and c) they would probably break on the way home. Off to the dollar tree I went.

I found plastic containers 6/$1. Awesome. Found cookie cutters in a pack 5/$1. Awesome. Bought some 3"x4" Avery shipping labels and printed them up with the words Gingerbread Playdough outlined on there for the kids to color, along with the directions.

In class, the kids decorated their labels, then came to me to make their dough mix. In their container they put 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of salt, 2 tsp cream of tartar, 2 T. cinnamon, and several shakes of nutmeg and ginger. We put the labels on the lids, let them pick out a cookie cutter, and tied it all together with a ribbon.

Off to their homes they went with their box of dough mix. To complete it, you just stir the ingredients in a saucepan with 1 cup of water and 2 T. oil. It gets kind of clumpy but you just keep stirring and once it comes together in a dough, you knead it and turn the kids loose. My hands still smell good from kneading it. Will store in an airtight container for several weeks.

Fun gift for friends and neighbors, right?! You can go fancy, like in the original post, or you can go Dollar-Tree version like I did for the class of 19 kids.