DIY Moon Sand

*Huge thanks to The CSI Project and Life in the Motherhood for featuring this project!* I haven't been able to do any crafting lately and if you follow me on Facebook you know why. I felt the need to make something though and when I saw the recipe for moon sand on Play Based Learning I had to try it out. I tweaked the recipe a bit and this is what I came up with:

1. Gather your ingredients: 2 cups Sand, 1 cup Corn Starch, 1/2 cup Water, and food coloring of your choice. I already had some white decorative sand from Dollar Tree that I had used to weigh down candle holders at Halloween. You can find it in the floral section. It is a finer than regular sand which makes it work a little better for this project. One container was almost exactly 2 cups.

2. Have your helper stir together the sand and cornstarch in a bowl. 2b. Ignore the sad fruit in the background and let all of blogland see it instead of taking the two seconds to move it out of the way. This step is very important. :p

3. Have your helper put a few drops of food coloring into the water. We put about four drops in and it was pretty pale so you might want to put in a little more. Or you might be able to find colored decorative sand which would be more vibrant and eliminate this step altogether. I was just working with what I already had though since we have a renewed motivation for getting out of debt (more on that another day - it's pretty exciting!) which means no unnecessary spending. 4. Pour the colored water into the sand mixture and stir together. If needed, slowly add more water until it is a consistency that it easy to mold.

5. Transfer to a cake pan or cookie sheet to keep it all contained while you are playing with it.

6. Dig in! Hours of homemade entertainment!
7. When Jer was done playing I put our Moon Sand into a couple of lunch meat containers. If it starts to dry out just add more water and it's good as new.
8/26/2011 EDIT: I just pulled these out of the cabinet and they seem to have some kind of mold on them. You may want to let it dry out before storing and just add water before playing with it again. I have also seen people make it with baby oil which I assume would eliminate the mold issue.
This recipe doesn't work *quite* as well as the real stuff but it was FREE so I'm not complaining! Even if you had to go buy all of the supplies it would still cost less then $2 and the quantity that it made would cost about $15 in the store.
The other nice thing about this project was that Jeremy got to help me make it which is always his favorite part. It's kind of like our Homemade Playdough; it may not be as cool and bright as the store bought stuff but he still likes it better because he made it himself!