If you’re not familiar with Model Magic air dry clay, I have to say it’s one of my favorite materials to work with. Not unpleasant to touch (like Sculpey) or to smell (like Play-Doh), and extremely malleable. It’s a very forgiving material when you’re working with it. It doesn’t start getting dry and crumbly while you work, it doesn’t stick to or stain your hands. It takes about 24 hours for creations to dry, and has to be handled carefully during this time so it doesn’t get squished flat, but after that, it’s pretty durable. Really easy to mix colors – I find them one of the most effective ways to illustrate color mixing for kids… you’ll see in the picture below that the blue and yellow blend together completely to make a nice pure green. (Color mixing tip: put two colors together then twist then fold. Repeat till mixed. The twisting really mixes them well).

Examples: I used Model Magic to make a model of the Earth’s layers and a model of the solar system to use in class demos. We use them for fossil impression in Dinosaur week or shell impressions in Sink or Float week, and to make insects in Bug week.

It is much cheaper in bulk. If you buy a small package with 6 half-ounce packets, it’s $6 – that’s $2 an ounce. I bought 75 one-ounce packs 75 one-ounce packs for $39. That’s 52 cents an ounce. (It also comes in several other sizes.)

You need to make your items pretty small for them to dry effectively. This is not a good product for big sculptures, but fine for little things – like bugs. The balls for the spider were about the size of shooter marbles, the balls on the caterpillars were smaller than marbles, but bigger than peas. I didn’t keep track of how many bugs we could make with one ounce of clay, but I’d guess four?