Christmas Tree Dough

Play dough is a firm favourite here and adding a Christmas theme to our tough ensured the children were keen to come and play. Children were provided with dough and rolling pins together with Christmas tree shaped cutters enabling them to cut out their own trees. 

Through providing jars of stars and gems the children were soon in the mood for tree decorating. Even with the same base materials the different ages and creative skills of the children resulted in a wide variety of finished products. 

This activity enabled children to practice their fine motor pincer grip together with lots of pushing and pinching skills as they worked together to decorate their trees in their own creative ways. 

Autum Play Dough 2017

Play dough is a great resource that encourages open ended play while, through its malleable nature, allows children to develop their hand and wrist muscles in preparation for writing. It encourages exploration when combined with other objects and often forms the basis for mathematical development through promoting counting and discussions about shapes and sizes. 

For that reason play dough is a much loved resource here and the children thought it was great when presented with Autumn coloured play dough together with some of the Autumn objects we collected from out and about. 

The children are encouraged to share a wide range of tools and often, after starting individually, begin to work together to create structures of invent stories. One child decided to sort out all the conkers and push them into the dough and, with encouragement, began to count the objects. 

I was impressed with the wide range of colourful results and, as ever, our school age children couldn't resist coming and joining in. 

Diwali 2015

Diwali marks the Hindu New Year and is a 3 day festival. It can also be known as the festival of lights as Hindus light up their houses with Diwali clay lamps know as diyas. At Diwali, Hindus draw bright Rangoli patterns to encourage the goddess Lakshmi to enter their homes.  Having looked at some pictures of the Diwali celebrations we through it would be a nice idea to create our own rangoli patterns. 

We decided to make the haters with the natural materials we had in the house. We made some play dough and gathered up some beans, lentils and chickpeas. We then looked at some simple patterns to give the children some ideas. 

Using their fine motor skills the children picked out the objects they wanted for their pattern and began to create this on the dough they had rolled out. We ended up with a huge variety of patterns and the year 2 boys (aged 6) particularly enjoyed this activity.

Ocean Sensory Dough

We frequently visit the local aquarium and as such I know how fascinated all the children are by the fish and other sea creatures. This provided a perfect theme for our latest sensory play. I created play dough in different shades of light and dark blue and in a green/blue colour. We talked about how they were all different colours of blue, discussing light and dark. 

To the tray we added some plastic sea creatures in addition to some shells, glass pebbles and a small number of tools to move the dough around. The children were fascinated with the shiny glass stones and chose to make different shapes sticking them and the shells into the dough, one even saying he had made a snowman. 

Throughout the play the children practised their counting skills, counting out and comparing the number of stones in their sculptures. We also discussed the sounds that we could hear at the beginning of the animal words such as sss for seal and t for turtle.