Welcome to week 4 of ‘Toddler Tuesdays’. You can find more of our ‘Toddler Tuesdays’ activities here, we hope you are enjoying them. This week’s activity is introducing playdough mats.

You will need -

A print out of our playdough mats which can be found here, or your own selection of playdough mats.
Page protectors to put your printed playdough mats into, or you may choose to laminate them.
Playdough. Our favorite home made playdough recipe can be found here.

Instructions -

Have everything prepared at the kitchen table or a toddler table before introducing the activity to your child. Using playdough assist your child to make food for the plate, add features to the face, candles to the cake and plants or vegetables to the garden. Use key phrases like, ‘roll it’ and ‘squash it’ as appropriate. If you have more than one colour playdough available you may like to comment on colour, eg ‘green peas’, ‘pink candles’. If your child plays with playdough often they may want to do their own thing, sculpting, cutting etc. We would encourage you to sit with your child and model the use of the mats so they get the idea.

Focus -

Throughout the activity there are key phrases that you can use to encourage language development. If your child is already speaking this activity is a great opportunity to expand on that, eg ‘My face needs a?’ ‘What fruit would you like on your plate?’ ‘Can you help me count the candles?’ ‘Let’s sing Happy Birthday.‘ Even if your child is not engaging in this discussion answer your own questions modeling and imprinting the correct language and grammar.

Using playdough helps to strengthen all of the muscles in the hands and fingers which will help to refine fine motor skills. Rolling and positioning small pieces of dough helps to practice these skills. Building hand strength and co-ordination is essential when moving into the preschool years as it will assist with pencil grip and make writing easier.

If you try out one of our activities please let us know what your toddler (and you) thought. Feel free to leave a comment here or post an image or comment to our Facebook page. If you enjoy the activity we would encourage you to share this post with your friends.