Playdough Learning Activities

Playdough is a classic kid’s toy, and it is so great for learning and developing motor skills. It gives you another way to introduce material, from forming letters and numbers to learning colors and just making fun pieces of art. Pinching, rolling, and other manual skills can be developed by playing with playdough, too!

You can buy playdough or make your own (this was our favorite recipe back in the day). And if you’re looking for more fun adds in and recipes, check out this post from Stay at Home Educator. Here are some fun — and educational! — ways to use it.

Playdough mats are a classic and you can find them on just about any theme. Here are a few educational playdough mats to download:

Counting 1-10: Life Over Cs
Letters: 123 Homeschool 4 Me
Shapes: 24 Hour Family
Another take on shapes: Planes and Balloons
Colors: Fun-a-Day
Weather: Homeschool Share
Life cycles: Homeschool of 1

You can find playdough mats for holidays, to fit unit studies, or just for fun. The Aloha Hut has a great post about how to use playdough mats to foster creativity in kids, as well as some printables for things like faces, empty places and cakes that kids can decorate with dough.

Of course mats aren’t the only way to play with playdough. Playdough trays are another fun way to play with dough that can have a particular theme. Early Learning Ideas has a great post all about using playdough trays throughout the year with different theme ideas like flowers, apples, spiders, Christmas and more. Pocket of Preschool talks about the benefits of playdough trays in preschool and kindergarten classrooms, including more skill development, social skills and creativity.

Trays are an easy way to add manipulatives to playing with dough, but there are lots of other easy things you can do. Adding some craft sticks makes it easy to make basic shapes, like in this post from Messy Little Monster, or for kids to build other creations. Or try adding pasta to your playdough with these ideas from Playtivities.

Sun Alphabet Playdough Mats

Talk about Emotions with Emoji Playdough

How to Make Snow Playdough

Playdough Activity Mats

Next Plan Idea:

Easy Sensory Activities for Valentine's Day

I guess this isn’t exclusively a kid’s craft or learning activity (though cutting and folding are great for developing fine motor skills!) but I think kids would love having some of these printable holiday houses around the house or classroom to play with in the holiday season. Because they’re made of paper, they’re inexpensive to make, and while there is assembly involved the results are well worth the work.

If you have a cutting machine you can use the cut files from Delia Creates to make making your own paper village that much easier. She actually cut out all her buildings in different colors of card stock and used them to decorate a wreath, but you could also put them on the mantle or on a low table for kids to play with. Make a whole small world scene complete with fake snow, little characters and other elements, and kids are sure to start making their own stories to go with the setup.

This set of houses is printed and cut out using a craft knife. It’s meant to be an advent calendar, with each of the buildings numbered and you can stick a treat inside. But you could also just play with the buildings! You can get a free download of four buildings from Little House on the Corner, or head to the post to see where you can buy the whole set.

The Mavelo website isn’t in English, but their printable gingerbread house template is super cute to use as a gift box or to play with. If you need the instructions the website is in Polish but Google Translate seems to do a pretty good job.

Bora Illustrates has an adorable little house to print, cut and assemble featuring a cat, bird and gingerbread person. You could probably print it in black and white and have your kiddo color it, too.

Next Plan Idea:

Comments

Have you read?

Leave a Reply