8 Fun Ways to Learn with Play Dough
Do your little ones love to play with play dough? I have some super simple, fun ideas for incorporating learning and academics into your little learners’ playing with play dough. Come see!
Ooh, and there are a couple FREE PLAY DOUGH ACTIVITIES for you near the end of this post!
1. Create pictures.
Creating pictures and items that are familiar in every day life is a fun way to incorporate some simple learning into play time! Giving kiddos play dough to create scenes, pictures, and objects that they see on a normal day helps learning feel comfortable and natural.
So, when she builds an ice cream cone, ask her what flavor it is and why she chose to create that flavor. When he builds a car wash scene, ask him to tell you what comes next in his story. This might seem so simple, but these kinds of questions and prompts are the foundations of imagination, writing skills, and creative thinking, which are all essential in building early literacy.
Letters are some of the most important literacy building blocks we have, so early exposure to them is always a good idea! Your little learners can create letters on their own or build them as shown on a play dough mat, but either way, seeing those shapes and connecting them with their letter names and sounds is a perfect way to incorporate early literacy skills into play time.
Sing the ABC’s while they build each letter or try to think of words that begin with that letter. After your learners can mostly identify these letter names on their own, they can start differentiating between upper and lowercase letters and exploring phonics skills like letter sounds too! Letters plus play dough is the perfect combination for fun literacy practice!
Recognizing and naming shapes is another simple activity that meshes perfectly with play dough time! Learners can build shapes, combine shapes, name shapes, create their own shapes, and practice any kind of “shape skill” you need them to learn.
Try matching up the shape picture to it’s word. Can your little ones count the sides on the shapes? Have they learned what vertices are yet (the corners or points on a shape)? Want to try combining two shapes to see if you can build a new shape or a different shape you recognize? Building shapes with play dough is such a great opportunity to learn through discovery and experience. You can add in some pattern blocks, foam shapes, or even shape stickers into the mix to keep the learning fun and interesting.
Being able to retell and recall the sequence of events in a story is a comprehension skill that every young learner will eventually master, so right now is a great time to start practicing! You can combine a play dough activity like the one pictured here with the matching book to create a whole literacy lesson for little ones.
To work on retelling skills, read the story together and then work with your little ones to decide what happened in the beginning, middle, and end (or first, next, last) of the story. Place the pictures on the mat in the correct sequential order and then they can create the picture with play dough afterward. Making literacy hands-on in this way is an awesome way to increase retention and comprehension.
Another engaging way to use play dough for learning is to illustrate and create the life cycles of living things, like ladybugs or frogs! These life cycle mats are a great guide for little ones to create each step of the life cycle of the animals.
I love to combine a hands-on activity like play dough with a book that teaches basic facts about the topic. This ladybug life cycle book pairs perfectly with our activity for representing the life cycle with play dough. If you can add in some experience with real, live ladybugs, that’s even better!
But, even the act of using their hands to create something while learning something new is really helpful to increasing comprehension. So, whether they can create each step very well yet or not, exploring nature and the life cycles we may see happening just outside our doors with books and play dough is beneficial to little ones’ learning.
Number sense is a super important skill for young learners to develop. A few easy ways to build number sense are things like identifying numbers, representing those numbers with pictures or objects, and counting things! So, using play dough to accomplish those goals is a SUPER simple way to do it!
Your little ones can play “count and smash” games by choosing a number, showing the number with play dough balls, and then smashing each one. Or use cookie cutters to create a certain number of objects to show numbers? Or even just practice counting the pictures or objects they create! So many simple ways to use play dough to improve number sense.
You can grab some free number formation play dough mats in my free resource library by signing up to get emails from me! CLICK HERE to sign up for emails and grab the free number play dough mats.
This one might seem super basic, but identifying and naming colors is a must-have skill for all little learners. If your kids need some extra practice with this, play dough is exactly the tool you need!
Learners can practice identifying colors by creating objects and pictures that are the color they’re practicing. How many things can they make that are orange? Can they think of anything that’s blue? Or, grab some simple color play dough mats like these to help inspire them to make different creations in certain colors.
You can even incorporate color words by hanging up or pointing out a color word first and then challenging your learners to figure out what the word is and create some fun pictures using that color play dough! Lots of fun ideas for learning and playing with colors!
If your learners are ready to start working on letter sounds and sounding out words, you can use play dough for that too! Smashing play dough as you say each sound in a word or the sound of a specific letter creates that brain-body connection that helps learners retain the information more quickly.
Little ones can also smash use play dough to create pictures of objects that start with the letter sound you’re working on. For example, if you’re working on the sound of letter B, they can use play dough to create pictures like “ball”, “beach”, or “butterfly”, saying the letter B sound each time they create a new picture. Simple, playful activities like play dough creation or smashing is always helpful for keeping learning time fresh and meaningful!
And check out these other free playdough activities too!
Ice Cream Number Playdough Mats from Fairy Poppins
Free Playdough Pattern Mats from Literacy with the Littles
Preschool Dinosaur Activities from The Primary Parade
Cheering you on and hoping you have a super fun time creating and learning!
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