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

If it’s hot where you live, you might be looking for some fun activities you can do with kids inside the house. And while bubbles are generally a strictly outside the house kid of activity, these special bubbles are ones you can play with inside. It’s both a lot of fun and a science lesson.

These bubbles aren’t blown into the air, you blow them onto a tabletop gently through a straw.

What’s really cool about them is that they will stay on the table top without popping. You can even blow another bubble inside the first bubble, or stack bubbles on top of each other.

Why does this work? It’s thanks to a special ingredient in the bubble solution: sugar.

This particular recipe is from Play Party Game, but I’m sure you can find it other places with similar ingredients as well. But this post has a good explanation for what is normally happening with regular bubble solution made mostly with just soap and water, as well as why the sugar helps to make bubbles stronger and helps them last longer.

You could make this into a full on science experiment for your kids, comparing regular bubbles (this time you’ll want to do it outside or somewhere easy to clean) to the “unbreakable” bubbles, letting them hypothesize about what ingredients might help make bubbles stronger or what the sugar does to the solution.

You can talk about the molecular structure of the bubble being altered by the sugar, which makes it stronger and longer lasting.

They even have an activity kit you can buy to help guide your explorations and that offers extension activities for you to try.

Or you could just play with them. No judgement here; it’s summertime.

Grab the recipe and more of the science behind the bubbles from Play Party Game. And while you’re playing with bubbles you can also check out my giant bubble solution recipe over at Our Daily Craft.

[Photo: Play Party Game]

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