Make Your Own Dung: Play Dough Favor for a Safari Party

Kooks is about to turn two and we are busy planning her safari birthday party. What better way to celebrate the African bush than to play with wildlife poop? Today we worked on our “make your own dung” party favors for her guests to take home. I made play dough using a recipe from Musing From a Stay at Home Mom. The only problem was I couldn’t find any brown food coloring and the play dough cooks so fast I didn’t think I’d have time to mix the colors while cooking the dough. Instead I mixed all the different food colors I had together with the water before I added it to the dry ingredients. That way I could make sure I got a nice dark brown poo color. I also added a little bit of vanilla essence so at least our play dough doesn’t smell like dung! This is the color we were going for.

I made two batches, one came out slightly darker than the other which was great because, as we soon found out, wildlife dung does vary in color.

After I showed the littles our play dough, we went out for a walk to find some real dung. We inspected waterbuck dung.

We found that there were bits of grass in both the waterbuck dung and this buffalo dung.

Then we took a good look at this elephant dung. It had lots of grass and seeds from marula fruits. We dug around in it and pulled out enough marula seeds for all of our guests.

We cut a bunch of grass and washed off the marula seeds. Then left them to dry.

While they were drying, we packaged our play dough. We put a ball of each shade of dung into a plastic container and then added our label that read, “make your own dung – go wild!” The labels are a free printable from Print This Today (Jungle Animal Labels).  I pasted them to some green card, wrote our message, and laminated them before gluing them to the tops of our plastic tubs.

Each guest will get a tub of play dough and a bag of dried grass and marula seeds to bring home. The party is going to be a picnic by the river where we hope to see some wildlife but where there will definitely be some dung to identify and investigate. I hope the kids enjoy recreating the dung at home and I didn’t dig around in elephant poop for nothing!

The play dough pledge is a challenge set by Nurturestore, The Imagination Tree, and Sun Hats and Wellie Boots to try something new with play dough this week. Take a look at all the play dough activities of the week at this play dough linky hosted by Nurturestore.