Cloud Dough Igloo Building Challenge

When it is cold outside, kids get antsy. My kids will run through the house screaming if they don’t have something to occupy their time. One of our favorite activities to try on a cold day is cloud dough. Cloud dough has properties of dough and properties of sand, making it the perfect building material. For this activity, I challenged the kids to try to build cloud dough igloos.

Cloud dough is the basis for this activity. You can purchase cloud dough pre-made, but making it on your own is also super easy. We mixed flour and oil until it made a dough that could stick together when pressed, but that easily crumbled apart. Our recipe used 3/4 of a cup of oil and 4 cups of flour. I recommend doing this activity on a large tray (or outside), because it can get messy.

Before starting the building challenge, we looked up igloo designs online and talked about why igloos are built the way they are and how they work to keep the people inside them warm even though they are made of ice. The kids were fascinated that you could use ice to stay warm.

After our brief lesson, the building challenge began!

The kids tried various methods to build their cloud dough igloos. First, they tried to make bricks like real igloos are made of.

However, our dough was too crumbly and that design didn’t work.

Next, the kids formed the dough into an igloo shape, leaving a hollow opening in the center.

This cloud dough igloo design worked much better. The kids were able to make a series of igloos and created a whole igloo village.

Soon after building the igloos, the kids invented a disaster to destroy the village. They had just as much fun smashing the igloos as they did building them.