Salt Dough Starfish

Salt dough is great activity to try with kids at home, it can help develop their motor skills, strengthen fingers and is lots of fun! This activity is from our Seaside Activity Box and is inspired by the wonderful children’s book Clem and Crab by Fiona Lumbers. In the book Clem explores rock pools and so we discussed other creatures that we might find living in rock pools.

Set Up

For this easy kids activity we used the dry salt dough ingredients from our activity box. We also needed 45ml of water or roughly 3 tablespoons. A bowl to mix it in and a spatula. We also added the wooden matchsticks from the activity box to use to make textured patterns on the star fish.

M was very excited when she found out we were making salt dough as she loves that she gets to keep her creations after she has made them! F loves playing with play dough so was keen for the dough to be ready and made. As the ingredients were already weighed out they got to just enjoy pouring them in. I got them to spoon the water a little at a time as not only is it another great way to improve motor skills but also so we could check whether we would need all the water. They took it in turns to stir and mix and then got stuck in with their hands, squishing and squeezing.

Once the dough had come together and was nice and smooth we stopped adding water. Splitting the dough into roughly equal chunks we started to create our sea creatures. First we tried the method of splitting our chunk into 5 pieces. We rolled each piece into a sausage shape and then pressed all 5 sausages together at one end to form a star shape. We also tried rolling a ball of dough into a ball and then flattening it down. Once slightly flattened we pinched out 5 legs around the outside. Pinching and pulling them into 5 legs for our starfish. Next we used the matchstick to create a pattern of dots on our starfish. We also took tiny bits of dough and rolled them into balls and added them on top of our starfish too. Their final creations were baked in the oven on it’s lowest setting for 4 hours until they were dry. This activity was a very busy work out for their hands!