5 Easy Ways to use Play Dough!

As an occupational therapist, I like to find different ways to use the same material to work on various skills! This inspired me to start a series of posts of "5 easy ways to use"... various tools and materials that you probably already have in your home.

Play dough is fun and versatile. It's readily available and inexpensive to purchase, but you can also make it with ingredients you probably already have in your home! This recipe is a favorite of mine, and you can also make it with your kids (but be careful when it involves the stove and handling hot materials after).

Here are 5 of my favorite ways to use play dough!

1. Hide treasures inside, and have your child find them! This can include beads, little trinkets, small dollar tree finds, rocks, charms, coins, and buttons! This works on fine motor and bilateral coordination skills, and strengthens the small muscles in their hands, which is foundational for holding a writing utensil, cutting, and drawing. They need to use both hands to stabilize the play dough and dig through to pick out the small items inside with their pincer grasp!

2. Use it to practice cutting skills! Roll the play dough into a log, and use scissors to snip it into small pieces. The play dough allows for increased tactile and visual feedback when cutting, and it's pretty easy to snip because the piece falls off (rather than having to cut across a piece of paper) giving your child a sense of accomplishment. It also teaches your child to move their hand down the play dough, as the ends need to be stabilized (otherwise it will drop down). I like to have the kids cut small pieces and pretend it's food to "feed" any animal figurines that they have! There are lots of scissors available for different skill levels, including loop scissors, self opening scissors, and regular child sized scissors. My favorite training scissors convert from self opening scissors (that spring open by themselves) to regular child sized scissors.

3. While you're working on "feeding" the animals, you can also use a plastic fork or spoon to practice spearing or scooping the play dough. This works on using utensils and feeding without making a big mess. You can also use a plastic fork to cut apart play dough pieces, and work on numbers, counting, and simple math by counting the number of pieces that you cut.

4. Use play dough mats, or even any worksheets to scan and identify objects, numbers, letters or sight words. Have your child roll small pieces of play dough, and cover the item you want them to identify (i.e. Which boy looks sad?) This will address fine motor skills, and visual perception, in addition to any other skill related to what you're asking (can be math, comprehension, reading, social emotional learning, etc). There are lots of free templates available online, or you can even write or draw the numbers, letters and words that you want to work on- just put the page in a page protector or laminate it so it can be reused! (Side note- if you have a Canva account (free, and can pay to upgrade), you can search for tons of templates, especially if you happen to have an educator's account!).

5. Use play dough to form letters! You can use a template for this for visual support, but most letters can be made with a combination of big lines, little lines, big curves and/or little curves. For example, a lower case b is a big line down, and a little curve at the bottom. You can also play mystery letter with your child, asking "what letter has a big line and a big curve?" and having them form it (a letter "D"!) Some combinations will form multiple letters, (i.e. a big line and little curve could be a b, p, q, d, P, etc). For younger kids, you can have them form shapes (i.e. lines, circle, square, triangle) which are important prewriting skills to have as well, and foundational before they are expected to write or know their letters!

I hope that you find these ideas easy to implement and fun to use! Play dough is a great tool for developing that fine motor coordination and hand strength. I prefer that younger children practice using these manipulatives to develop their fine motor skills instead of introducing paper/pencil/worksheet tasks too early. The little ones often don't have the fine motor skills yet to properly hold a regular pencil for longer periods of time, and thus develop poor habits and inefficient grasps that are difficult to retrain later.

What are some of your favorite ways to use play dough?

For other posts in my "5 Easy Ways to Use.." series