Toddler Activities: Homemade playdough

I'm sure most of you have tried this by now, but I've only made homemade playdough once before and it came out too sticky. I found this recipe and had great success. It was around 4:30/5pm and my kids were transforming into bored, starving, moody little monkeys; I needed a quick activity they could do on their own while I made dinner. I whipped it up in just minutes, plopped it onto their table with a bucket of cookie cutters and enjoyed a good 45 minutes of PEACE. Beautiful.

Materials:
2 cups flour
2 cups warm water
1 cup salt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon cream of tartar (optional for increased elasticity)
food coloring

Mix all ingredients together and cook over low heat. They will begin to look like mashed potatoes and pull away from the sides. Remove it from heat and let it sit until cool enough to handle.
*If it's too sticky, just cook longer.

And for kicks, I added some green food coloring to mine for St. Patrick's Day. If you're doing one color, I would add the coloring at the very beginning with the other ingredients for best results.

This would be a fun activity to teach colors to toddlers. You could separate the dough into sections and add different colors to each section. Then have your toddler pick a color, like blue, and talk about it's name and other blue objects. Talk about blueberries, blue jays, a whale and then help your toddler make that object with the dough.
You could do the same with shapes and have them create triangles, circles, squares, and stars with their dough.

Or just have them play on their own with cookie cutters, like I did.