I grew up in the Czech Republic and, especially around the holidays, I tend to go back to projects that I did when I was little, the ones I loved and cherished. There is a big part of me that wants to share them with the kids I teach. And salt dough ornaments are one of them.

We made salt dough ornaments and candle holders every year. We would cut them out, sometimes we would paint them, other times we would decorate them with cloves and other times just add some cinnamon into them to make them smell nice. I love salt dough – aside from making your hands dry – it is really fun to work with. It is super easy to mix and really easy and frustration-free for the kids to roll and cut.  

Here is our little recipe, if you want to try it as well. We added a lot of cinnamon, cloves and basically leftover pumpkin spice we had from Thanksgiving baking.

I try to use easy recipes that the kids can read and measure with minimal help. I help them recognize the first letter and they usually guess what the ingredient is. They love it.

And they loved working on these cookies. We used different rollers – and talked about texture. We used real Christmas cookie cutters and placed all of the cut out cookies on a wooden board, that served as our baking tray. We then added some sequins, gems and cut up yarn as our sprinkles.

The really nice think about this project is, it air dries in a couple of days – and in the meantime makes the preschool smell amazing! Just know, that some decorations will fall off (just glue them back) and it tends to get lighter as it dries. You can mod podge it, paint it or just leave it be – whatever you prefer. We just put them in tiny little bags and used them in our pretend play bakery at preschool.