Homemade Sand Dough

Sand dough is a super fun sensory experience for kids, and it’s just as easy to make as traditional play dough.

Even kids who are not particularly sensory seekers need all kinds of textures in their daily lives. Experiencing different textures builds brains, and it helps kids increase their adaptability and resilience, and develop a healthy sense of adventure.

And if you know a kid who IS a sensory seeker? Hoo-boy, do you have a job for yourself putting all kinds of different sensations in front of that kid!

Whether you’re trying to meet a specific sensory requirement, or just because it’s new and different and fun, sand dough is an interesting alternative to traditional play dough. It cooks up nearly identically, molds nearly as well, and has a wonderful sandy feel that’s intriguingly dissimilar to the smooth, soft, light play dough that most kids are familiar with.

Spend some time playing with sand dough, and you’ll love it as much as I do!

Materials

To make sand dough, you will need:

• 2 cups sand. Contrary to what seems right and natural, you don’t actually want playground sand or beach sand for this project. You can’t really tell when you’re digging around in it, but both of those types of sand are FILTHY! Instead, look for craft sand. It doesn’t seem as fun to buy your sand rather than foraging it, and it’s sadly not free, but the benefit of craft sand is that you can buy it in every imaginable color. For this particular project, I used black craft sand, and I LOVE how vivid and saturated and very, very black it is.
• 1 cup flour. I like to use the cheapest possible flour for play dough, but yes, play dough emergencies do happen, and I have on occasion made excellent batches of play dough using organic flour (sigh!), bread flour, whole wheat flour… pretty much whatever flour I happened to have in my kitchen when the need for play dough struck!
• 1 cup water.
• 1/2 cup salt. Use the cheapest fine-grained salt at the store for this sand dough. Avoid rock salt, sea salt, large-grained salt, or any other fancy kinds of salts. Weird salt can be a cool way to experiment with texture in traditional play dough, but you’ve got enough going on, texture-wise, here.
• 1 tablespoon oil. Any food-grade oil that’s liquid at room temperature will work here, from canola oil to olive oil. I love this because it makes it easy to take into account any allergies or sensitivities a kid might have and adjust the recipe accordingly.

Step 1: Mix and heat.

Dump everything into a pot and heat it, while stirring constantly, on medium or medium-low heat.

The photo above is 1) taken in really crappy lighting, sigh, and 2) of traditional play dough, not sand dough, because believe it or not the lighting was even crappier while I was making my most recent batch of sand dough. But at least it gives you an idea of what your sand dough should look like as you heat it. You can see that it starts off looking like pancake batter, then gradually stiffens up as you heat it. You want the dough to eventually ball up and have no sticky or wet-looking parts. When you see that happen, remove the pot from the heat and let the sand dough cool.

Step 2: Knead by hand.

As soon as the sand dough is cool enough, dump it out onto the counter and finish kneading it by hand. Since you’re just finishing it off and making sure that the mixture is fluffy and consistent, this is a great task for a kid to help with.

This is also the perfect time to add in any other mix-ins. I added a little bit of purple sand, but it didn’t show in the black dough as well as it would have in a lighter dough, so I then added a bunch of bright silver glitter, and THAT gave me the pop that I was craving!

This dough is quite shelf stable, so it’s fine to make it in advance. You can even pop it into an airtight storage container and mail it to a kid across the country, which is what I did with this particular sand dough.

Sand dough is a wonderful sensory toy, and molds nearly as well as traditional play dough. But to give it an extra element of interest and fun, add accessories! One of my daughters played for years with a whole “mud kitchen” setup that I’d bought piecemeal from various thrift stores around town, and she liked using the various play doughs with their different colors and textures in combination with twigs, acorns, and leaves to make all the pies, cakes, and other concoctions that came out of her backyard kitchen. My other daughter liked to press shells and rocks into play dough and make landscapes for her toy dinosaurs to stomp through. Many a plastic Velociraptor has been buried inside sand dough and then dug out with a plastic Barbie shovel in this house!

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