How to Make Salt Dough Footprint Penguin

Salt Dough Penguins

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Tell me these are not adorable?? If you enjoy making keepsake crafts with your kiddos or class, this project is a must! I teach Pre-K at a private school and each week we have one big craft that we do with our class. It always centers around our “focus book” of the week. Last week, we read the book, “Tacky the Penguin” by Helen Lester. If you have never read this book, I would highly recommend it! It’s one of my January favorites!

Helen Lester has written multiple books about an “odd” bird named Tacky. They are all hilarious and I always find myself enjoying these stories just as much as my class!

After hearing this read aloud all week long, we decided to make some keepsake tacky feet penguins out of salt dough!

Salt Dough Recipe

2 cups of plain flour (all-purpose flour)
1 cup of salt
1 cup of water (you may need less)

*Be sure to mix the water in slowly. One of the batches we made was a little bit soupy and stuck to some tiny feet!

How To Make the Mold

Once the salt dough recipe has been mixed thoroughly, take a handful of the dough and mold it into an oval shape. Place it onto contact paper. Since we were making multiple molds, we labeled the top of the contact paper so we would know whose foot belonged to who! We had our kiddos remove one shoe and step real hard onto the dough. You might need to help them push their foot down so the toes get imprinted. After all, these later will end up being the penguins’ feet! I took ours home to bake so they would harden and put them in the oven for 2 hours on 250 degrees. Some of them needed to stay in a little longer. If you would like to skip the whole salt dough process, you can always purchase air dry clay. Same look, different type of clay.

Decorating the Penguin

Now for the fun part! Grab your baked feet, your paints and it’s time to get creative! We used tempera paint, in our classroom, but if I were doing this with my own kids at home, I might use acrylic because I think the paint colors are more vibrant. Also on another note…after trying this out, I might try the air-dry clay next time (yes, it is the more expensive route), but the clay is white which will also help your paints POP! Just a thought.