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

Learning numbers actually involves a few different skills, from recognizing the shape of the number and knowing the word that goes with it to understanding one to one correspondence for counting and what order the numbers go in.

A lot of this is learned best through play and activities that get kids counting and tracing and otherwise interacting with numbers. These activities can help.

I specifically mentioned tracing above because of these number formation rhymes cards from Teaching Mama, which can be used in lots of ways to practice making the shapes of the numbers, including tracing, lining up items on the number shapes (and counting them!), using playdough to shape the numbers and so on. Each number has a little rhyme to help you remember how to make it, which is cute.

And speaking of playdough, you can find lots of playdough number mats with different themes for kids to use as they learn about numbers. Preschool Play and Learn, for example, has these cute apple themed ones that also teach one to one correspondence as you learn the numbers and count to 10.

Or use these tree-themed ones from Live Over Cs to form the numbers, count out items on a ten frame and place the correct number of items in the tree to match the number (do this with playdough, little buttons or whatever manipulatives you have on hand). Your little builders will also love these Duplo number mats from Life Over Cs, which allow you to shape the number out of blocks and count out the number of blocks that corresponds to each number.

I also love these mats from The Savvy Sparrow that include the number and the word you can trace with playdough or marker, showing how to count the number on your fingers, a tens frame and a number line.

Finger plays and counting songs are lots of fun for little ones, too, and Childhood 101 has a great collection of songs and rhymes having to do with numbers (as well as printable song cards you can use with them.

This cardboard roll number chain form Hands On As We Grow would be a fun addition to singing number songs or to use in other play and counting games. And we all love something easy to make with stuff we already have.

Older kids who already know the order of numbers can also use these connect the dot number printables from Fun Learning for Kids. Or use the shapes for playdough mats or to practice tracing even for kids who don’t know all the numbers in order yet.

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