Top tips for playing with playdough
There are tonnes of opportunities to chat and develop language skills while you're playing with homemade playdough.
Ask your children to describe what they're doing while they play and how it feels. This is a great opportunity to introduce new words like "squishy", "sticky" and "gloopy".
If you added food colouring to your playdough, you can also talk about the different colours and help your child build these descriptive words into sentences.
Why not try telling a story together with objects you have made, or have a race to build the tallest tower?
Letting your child lead on this will be great for their confidence and their language learning, as they have to plan, think and problem-solve to reach their end goal.
There are loads of sensory benefits when playing with play dough. When kids use more than one of their senses during play, it can help their brain learn words more quickly.
Sensory play also helps your little one’s attention span. When a child plays with something hands-on, they might stay engaged with it for longer than if they just listened to spoken words.
Building strength in the muscles of the hands through activities like moulding, rolling and squishing helps prepare them for tasks like holding a pencil or scissors when they're older.
Playdough is a great way to introduce the concept of counting, shapes, descriptions, and more. All of these are a great basis for their first English and maths lessons when they start school.
