Introducing Play dough activities:
Play dough activities are indeed creative, imaginative and fun for kids of all ages. When my daughter was an year old, I didn’t want to introduce her to play dough, as she picked up and swallowed almost everything she could lay her hands on. Though I now know that there are some edible play dough options available that you can easily make at home, it is still probably best to wait until their teething stage has passed on and hence they are not gulping down anything and everything around.
Now my daughter is 2 and a half year old, and I introduced play dough at age 2. Even at that stage it took some debating with myself, as play dough activities can turn messy with play dough crumbs all over the house, if you do not confine it to a space. After a two to three day battle in my head “huge mess vs creative play“, the creative inside me caved in and I brought home 3 small play dough tubs.
If you are also battling about bringing play dough into your house you probably want to read the 5 benefits of playing and modeling with play dough. Though, if you do want to avoid mess at all costs, check out these great tips to limit mess during messy play.
5 Benefits of Playing and modeling with play dough:
1. Sensory:
Playing with play dough is a fun sensory activity for kids. Especially great for children who are a bit touch sensitive. You can even mix play dough with other textures like rice, beans, beads, straws or even some candle wax to make it an amazing sensory activity. Anna from the imagination tree uses many different creative extras with play dough to encourage sensory play.
Other Sensory Activities to explore:
1. Paper and cloth sensory bin.
2. Indoor fishing and sensory water activities.
3. Sensory Kinetic sand activities.
2. Fine Motor development:
When the little hands hold tools like a plastic play dough knife, or even when they simply make and model with their hands, pinch and squeeze the play dough, it helps them in the development of motor skills.
3. Improve Concentration and hand eye coordination:
Toddlers often have very little concentration skills. They move from toy to toy, never play with anything for more than 5 minutes and generally get bored very easily. This changes with play dough, to some extent. Because play dough provides limitless possibilities, they don’t get bored, sit in a single place and concentrate. Needless to mention, that when they build things with play dough, it naturally improves their hand and eye coordination.
4. Soothing and calming effect on kids:
Terrible twos are terrible twos for a reason. Play dough is indeed therapeutic. It has a calming effect on kids and even adults. I find it as a stress relief method for myself even, and as for my daughter, she calms down considerably, and forgets all about the tantrums she is throwing, and we sit and play together with our play dough.
5. A tool for learning and having conversations:
Play dough can be used to have conversations, comfortably, while sitting and playing, without having to run all around the house or shouting at the top of your voice. It can also be used for teaching a lot of things, and as you know, I love teaching my daughter through play. I will talk about some learning activities with play dough in the section below.
Learning with Play dough activities
Learning through play is an important aspect of a toddlers life. This is a developing stage for kids and teaching them creatively is important. You will find ideas for learning shapes, fruits and vegetables, as well as counting and math skills in the fun play dough activities listed below.
Learning shapes:
Since this is a pretty basic activity, you may already have some starter blocks around the house with different shapes. If not, you can use cookie cutters or even bottle caps in the beginning.
Simply flatten the play dough and let the children cut them into shapes.
Since I had colorful blocks at home, I decided to let her match colors too, along with the shapes.
It is a good idea to cover teaching different shapes in this manner. I have listed some basic shapes for preschoolers in this picture.
You obviously, will not have the blocks for all the shapes shown in the picture, but you can cut them easily with a pointed object (pen, skewer, cutter etc)
I also found another learning shapes with play dough activity that uses play dough and some toothpicks to teach shapes and build 2D and 3D models with play dough. It is a pretty great activity that I plan to do the next time we are working with play dough.
Learning Fruits & Vegetables:
For this activity you will need a plastic knife (you can use a plastic meter scale/ruler too)
The basic idea is for the kids to cut vegetables. My daughter just, absolutely, wants to cut veggies when I am in the kitchen, cooking! So I thought why not let her cut play dough veggies. You can also use a small cutting board for the kids, while they are doing this activity, just to give them the “real feel” .
While you are making play dough veggies and fruits for them(older kids can make it themselves), tell them the names of each fruit/vegetable.
Don’t worry too much about making them perfectly. Real fruits and vegetables aren’t perfect. They just need to look somewhat like the fruit/vegetable you are telling them it is.
When you have made a fruit/vegetable, ask them to make one themselves. Whatever the shape, they will still have loads of fun cutting them.
For a list of basic fruits, please see the image below
Learning to count:
This is an extremely fun activity to do with toddlers and preschoolers. You can do this with a group of kids as well. Come to think of it, it will be more fun in a group.
The simplicity of this idea, is what makes it so special.
Just make a simple caterpillar head with a different color, and ask the kids to make small green balls.
Keep adding balls to the caterpillar and keep counting. Make the caterpillar as large or as small as you like.
If you are doing this in a group, you can give a separate color tub to each kid to make a colorful caterpillar.
Alternately, to facilitate counting, you can keep changing the color of the caterpillar after every 10 balls.
Another fun idea to teach counting is through a silicone ice cube tray. I had this cool and fun fish ice cube tray that we used.
My daughter filled the fishes with play dough, and counted along as she went.
The fishes didn’t come out as well as I was expecting. I mean, when we took the fishes out, they didn’t even look like fishes. But it was still fun to just fill the mold and learn counting.
You can ask the kids to fill 1 fish in the first line, 2 in the second, 3 in the 3rd. Then, you can also start to work on their math skills by asking them to count the fishes all together. (1+2+3=6)
You can also fill the fish molds with different coloured dough and then ask the kids to count fishes of a particular color. (Example: How many green fishes are there? The answer in this case would be 3 )
Imaginative Play:
Play dough really provides an opportunity for creative and imaginative play.
You can actually pretend and imagine the play dough to be anything you want it to.
I made mini burger breads from play dough and some different colored slices to put inside. My daughter really enjoyed stacking the slices and making a little burger for her mommy and daddy.
Next, we made some cupcakes. I had some mini cupcake molds that we used, and even added a layer of frosting. I wish I had seen this birthday party play dough idea before, as it would have been really fun to decorate our cupcakes with jewels and beads.
If you love these play dough activities, you will also like Kinetic sand activities. Kinetic sand is made of real sand and is probably the next best thing to going to a beach. And it is probably a tad better than a sand pit because you get to play with sand but it is a lot less messy.
With kinetic sand, you get to explore different molds with depth and detailing. Definitely check it out!
I always love hearing any comments, suggestions and ideas. Please drop your comment below and let me know if you liked this post.
Wow it’s really amazing activity for children and kenetic sand activity it’s bes t for kids because they not stick hand they remove easily
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