Playdough is very good sensory activity for little ones. Homemade playdough is even better! You and your child can play with it by squishing, rolling, and pounding it with your hands. You can use plastic forks and knifes, to make marks in it and cut it. Using cookie cutters is a good way to make different shapes with the playdough. As you are playing with playdough make sure you talk about the way it smells and how it feels. Get the pay ideas and the recipe below.
Sensory Play Idea:
Get the recipe for Homemade Playdough
Here are a few ways that playing with playdough helps children’s development:
- Fine Motor skills Playdough helps build finger and hand strength as they work on rolling, squishing, and pinching their creations. Children develop hand-eye coordination as they use their hands to shape the dough. Using a “pincer grasp” is an early developmental milestone and playdough can help with this as children learn to use their thumb and index finger to pinch the dough.
- Social Skills Playing with playdough can be useful in building skills like sharing as children learn to take turns with using that favorite tool to cut or squish their playdough. Children can practice communication as they talk about their creation, ask for a tool, and express their feelings. As children get a little older they start to learn to collaborate and work together to create games with rules.
- Other skills Playdough play can help with building language and literacy as they learn new words and new concepts, such as “chop,” “roll,” and “flatten”. They can start to build early concepts of critical thinking, playdough is not uniform, it can be top heavy, side heavy, or bottom heavy depending on how it is shaped. It takes critical thinking to evaluate the situation and figure out what changes need to be made to get their object to stand how they want it to. They can learn to express creativity and explore their imagination as they build new food items, a made-up animal or recreate things they see in their world around them. Playdough is a very calming play activity. As you help your child think about the colors they are looking at, the weight in their hands, and the smell will help them focus on their senses. This is a grounding activity which helps build emotional awareness.
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