One of my students this year has Celiac’s Disease, so she can’t eat or be around products that have gluten. That rules Play Dough right out.
I’ve been researching some alternatives:
1. You can buy gluten-free dough, but it’s horribly expensive.
2. You can make your own, but I carry a certain play-dough curse that prevents that option.
3. There’s some stuff called Play Foam or something like that, and that looks kinda cool. It’s foam beads suspended in goo and supposedly it doesn’t dry out. I’ll be trying that.
4. Moon Sand, but I hear it’s awful.
I was looking for the foam stuff at Wal-Mart tonight, but they didn’t have it. However, they did have Moon Dough, so I brought it home for a test run.
It comes packaged in more plastic. Yuck. (Side note: the actual container is recyclable, unlike regular Play-Dough containers.)
Dumped out of the bag, it looked so dry. Upon picking it up, it is crazy light. Almost cotton-candy-light.
It is strangely crumbly. You squish it and it sticks together, but bits of it squish away and crumble off the big lump. It feels neat to hold, but so many bits to pick up make this a deal breaker. Plus, my hands felt weird afterward.
So: Final review – you have failed to wow, Moon Dough.
UPDATE: I have wound up making a couple of batches of buckwheat play dough that have worked out well, and just bought some of this foam dough from Discount School Supply, and it is a big hit with the kids!