Five Playdough Activities that Kids Will Love!
With Easy Playdough Recipe and Printable Playmats
Playdough is a staple of childhood. Not only is it fun and engaging for kids, it fostors creativity and fine motor skills. In this post you will find five activities that are sure to keep your kiddos busy and learning as well as sparking imagination and happy times! In addition, there is an easy recipe so that you can make your own playdough with your kids and printable playmats that will make playing with playdough even more fun!
Five Playdough Activities
Playdough Sculpting and Molding
Encourage children to shape and mold playdough to create various masterpieces from their imaginations. It can be animals, vehicles, buildings, fantasy creatures, snowmen, food, flowers, characters, etc. The chilren can also free form the playdough into letters, numbers, shapes, or words. The possibilities are endless!
Cookie Cutter Fun With Play-dough
Using cookie cutters with playdough is probably one of the most common activities but did you know that you can buy cutters specifically made to use with playdough. They are a great learning tool. Click below to see the playdough cutters: letters, numbers, shapes, animals, themes. Use the cut out letters to learn the alphabet or make words. Or try the alphabet stamps to stamp the letters/words into the playdough for reading and spelling fun.
Fine Motor Skills Activities
Playdough is great for working on fine motor skills and strengthening hand muscles. Rolling, patting, and shaping dough works those little hands. Add even more skill work by having children use safety scissors, a toy knife (with supervision), popsicle sticks, or other tools like those pictured in the set to do even more with the playdough. Playdough is great for helping kids struggling with using scissors. Just roll out a “snake” shape and have them snip away. You don’t have to buy a playdough set. Just use kid safe items you have around the house.
Learning Fractions With Play-dough
Using playdough is a great way to teach children about fractions. Using something like playdough that they can manipulate with their hands will make the concept much more understandable. Roll out strips of dough and have them cut them into equal parts: halves, thirds, etc. Use these cut pieces to practice addition and subtraction with fractions as well. Make a fraction pizza and cut into slices to represent fractions or put pepperoni on one half of the pizza, etc.
Play With Your Food
Use playdough to add another dimension to pretend play by creating food for playtime cooking, restaurant, or tea party play. Just be sure the children know that it is for fun and not for eating!
Creative Play with Playdough and Playmats
Using playmats makes playing with playdough extra fun. Children can use their imaginations to decorate the playmats in any way they choose. When I was teaching kindergarten it was always such fun to see the designs that the students would come up with. Using a playmat also gives them something to put their playdough on while they are playing. Click here or below to download the two free sample playmats. Print them on colored or plain paper, put in a page protector or cover with clear contact paper, and watch your child create!
What a Good Day Playdough Playmats
If you and your child love the sample playmats we have 20 more in this pdf download. There are playmats for holidays and for seasons throughout the year. You can print these on colored tagboard or construction paper. If you only have white paper you can print them and let your child color them first. Place them in clear page protectors or cover with clear contact paper to use them again and again. They are great simple patterns to use for many different activities with your children.
How to Make Playdough
This easy recipe is from Kristin, one of the partners here on What A Good Day! She put this recipe in her church cookbook when she was a little girl! The pictures above show just how easy it is to use this recipe to make your own playdough. Kids can help by putting the ingredients in the pot and getting them stirred up. An adult will need to do the heating, stirring, etc. It is such fun to watch the process! Check out the recipe below for the full details!
Homemade Playdough (not edible)
Ingredients
- 1 cup plain flour
- 1/2 cup salt
- 2 tsp cream of tartar
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 cup water
- Food coloring
Instructions
- Mix first 5 ingredients together with a whisk. If only making one color dough you can add food coloring now before heating. If making more than one color then wait to add dye after cooking by dividing into balls and tinting as described below.
- Heat on medium high heat stirring constantly. Usually takes about 3 minutes or so.
- When thickened, turn out, let it cool a few minutes, then knead on the countertop. (No flour is necessary.)
- At this point, divide into as many balls of dough as you need for the colors you are making.
- Use your thumb to make an indention in the ball and place the dough in a quart size ziplock bag. Add a few drops of food coloring into the indention. I use around 15 drops in mine but you can make it as light or dark as you'd like.
- Now begin to knead to mix the color into the dough. This takes a little work. Do not knead with bare hands as food coloring will stain your hands. You could also use some rubber gloves instead but cover your surface well with a couple of layers of wax paper to protect your table or counter.
- Once mixed in the colors will not transfer to skin or table. Store the playdough in airtight containers and it will keep for a long time and provide hours of entertainment.
- Do not allow children to eat this playdough.
Have fun together! Make every day a good day!
Karen
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