A Week With Playdough
Monday 20 April 2009
Making your own playdough is a cheap and cheerful activity to do with your toddler. Here’s how to keep the fun going all week long, with five tried and true activities my two year old loves.
Monday – make your playdough together. A basic recipe is 1/2 cup salt, 1 cup plain flour, 2 tbs cream of tarter, 1 cup water, a little oil and food colouring. Mix dry ingredients, then add water and oil. Finally add your colouring. Cook for a few minutes on the stove top until dough forms. Leave until cool or your toddler will burn their little fingers! Allow some free play time with the new playdough. (If your kids don’t regularly play with playdough, read this article on how to set up a playdough kit.)
Tuesday - Playdough Pictionary. You make something (animals work well) out of playdough and your toddler guesses what it is. Give clues as you make your animal (or object). “I’m making an animal. Can you guess what it is? My animal has four legs (make legs). My animal has a body and a loo-oong neck (make body and neck). My animal has a little head (make head)…” Keep giving clues until your child guesses the animal (it was supposed to be a giraffe, not a dinosaur). The running commentary you give models excellent language structure and vocabulary for your toddler, and they are likely to copy when it’s their turn.
Wednesday – nursery rhymes. Do a nursery rhyme playdough performance! Pick a simple nursery rhyme – the simpler the better. Make the characters you need together, either with cutouts or as you did in yesterday’s game. (eg for Jack and Jill you’ll need two people cutouts and a bucket. For Humpty Dumpty you’ll need an egg shape cut in half and put gently back together, and a wall.) Show your toddler how to “act out” the rhyme with their playdough as you sing the song together. This always gets a “do it again!” response.
Thursday – make an impression. Choose three objects from the playdough toys. Roll a ball of playdough out thickly. Get your toddler to close their eyes while you use an object to make an impression in the dough, then remove the object. Your toddler then has to work out what made that shape. This is hands down my daughter’s #1 playdough game. She is now very good at it, using multiple shapes in her impressions and playing for easily up to an hour!
Friday – take it out! Ok, so playdough is usually an “inside” activity. Change things up by letting your kids have playdough outside. Let them stick leaves, twigs, feathers, and whatever else they find into the playdough. Let them make balls out of playdough and roll them across the grass. Let them make animals to roam through the yard. Let them make impressions with leaves. I know what you’re thinking… “but the playdough will be ruined!” So what?! Throw it out. After all, it probably cost you less than a dollar and you’ve had a week’s worth of fun out of it.Have another idea to add? I’d love to hear it (and other mums probably would too). Just leave a comment below…
We made playdough this week and my younger two (4 and 7) have had a great time with it. My daughter (who will be 8 in two days) asked for some extra to be made so that she can play with her friends when they come over on her birthday.
When I make mine, I use boiling water instead of cooking the dough on the stove. I measure it out, add the food colouring then pour onto other ingredients + mix. Still need to be careful with young helpers that it doesn’t splash.
Mine use their playdough to make pretend food to use to play restaurant games.
Thanks for the activity tips.
I also use non bake play dough with my kids. Another game that we used to do is let them try mixing of colours by squishing the various different colour balls together. Interesting week of activities you had with your little one.
I am so glad to have found you on the problogger forum! We have a lot in common…except that I live in an Amish town in the U.S.!
@Susan @Dominique – thanks for the extra ideas. Might be able to keep the playdough going for another week! LOL.
@Sarah Mae – Wow. Thanks for coming by and commenting. I’ve checked out your inspiring blog a few times since starting the challenge. Hope you don’t mind if I add you to my blogroll…
Hi fantastic ideas I have never tried before.
We use the same recipe however I use a heat proof microwave bowl and cook it for 30 second intervals mixing inbetween.
We usually make a restaurant too.
I recently had my first foray into playdough, thanks to you Cath! We made snails and butterflies, and pushed pegs into the playdough. We made pretend biscuits and baked them in the pretend oven. And you can also make a great chocolate cake with cream of tarter! I keep mine in the fridge so it lasts longer.
Hi Cath,
Glad to see you had such a wonderful week of play dough activities. My two year old daughter just loves to make pretend birthday cakes and sing Happy Birthday to us all. She uses cut up drinking straws for the candles and then proceeds to blow them all out. Another favourite is making pretend pizzas and cutting them all up into wedges. I also switched to using the method of making play dough with the boiling water instead of in the saucepan. It saves having to wash up the saucepan and it is ready to use within minutes. There are so many things that can be added to your play dough kit. I just keep finding more and more…I think we almost need a bigger tub! I loved reading your article. Well done
Nothing beats making home-made playdough – my girls still enjoy it at 8 and 10!
So lovely to read all your comments. You encourage me to keep blogging!
[...] 1. Make a collage. My daughter never gets tired of sticking bits of bark, leaves, feathers and twigs onto cardboard. Go figure. It costs next to nothing, takes up a good chunk of time, and you end up with an artwork that generally looks pretty good! PVA glue needed, so you’ll have to supervise this one closely. Alternatively try a playdough collage. [...]
This week with the pre-primary class I am working with we are looking at the letter ‘G’ so we made green playdough with gold glitter and then turned it in to a garden using your idea from “Friday – Take it out!”. The children absolutely loved it!!! Thanks so much =)