Shape, Bake, Create!

Get creative and hands-on with the 'Salt Dough Decorations' activity! This fun and simple craft allows Scouts to design, bake, and decorate their own unique creations using just flour, salt, and water. Perfect for celebrations or as keepsakes, this activity inspires imagination while building practical skills in a safe, engaging environment.

Before you begin

• Make sure all youth and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help if you’re short on helpers

Planning and setting up this activity

• You may want to prepare the salt dough before running the session
• You may want to run this activity over two weeks to give time to bake and paint the salt dough

Prepare the salt dough

1. Gather everyone in a circle and explain you’ll be making salt dough decorations to celebrate and hang up. Remind everyone taking part that the dough is not edible, so they shouldn’t put anything in their mouths, noses or ears.
2. Tell everyone that they’re going to make a salt dough decoration, sculpture or craft. Mix together two parts plain flour to one part salt - table salt works well!
3. To make a plain dough, slowly add one part water until it’s the right consistency. It needs to be not too crumbly, but not too sticky.
4. To make coloured dough, cut the amount of water in half and replace with food colouring. Add this slowly to your dry mix of salt and flour until it reaches the correct consistency.
5. (Optional) You could also add bio-degradable glitter to make the dough sparkly.

Designing

1. Show everyone what is available for making the decorations, sculptures, models or ornaments from the salt dough. You may have different coloured doughs, cookie cutters in various shapes or butter knives for cutting details in the designs.
2. Give out pens and paper, so people can plan and draw out their designs for their ornaments.
3. Everyone should take some dough and start to model it.
4. Scouts can model the dough however they want to. They could make a sculpture, a pot, a hanging decoration or a table centrepiece.

Bake

1. Place the finished decorations on a flat baking sheet.
2. Bake the salt dough in an oven, set at 180° for 30 minutes. An adult volunteer may want to do this outside of the meeting.
3. When cooked, use heatproof gloves to remove the tray from the oven and turn the oven off.
4. Leave the tray on a safe, heatproof and stable surface to cool down completely, away from youth.

Decorate

1. After they’ve cooled down, the salt dough can be painted or coloured using markers.
2. You could also glue or stick craft items onto them, such as sequins, gems or stickers.
3. If you’ve made a hanging decoration, thread a ribbon or twine through the hole in the top and tie a knot. Then, choose somewhere to hang it up and enjoy!

Reflection