We haven’t gotten very creative with play dough lately.
The kids get it out and play with it. It usually consists of making food for us to pretend eat, or driving trucks and tractors through it to make tracks.
I was looking for a quick activity to do one evening, and had fine motor skills on my mind.
I kept telling myself that play dough is such a great tool for fine motor skills, but never really utilized that.
Fine motor and strengthening hands.
Rolling out worms and snakes should be a natural thing to do with play dough, but for my kids, its never been.
I decided to make an activity where they had to!
I wrote their names on paper, as big as I could really (but it could have been bigger to make this easier).
I showed them how to roll the play dough (they do know how, but they needed to see how small to roll it).
Then they each spent lots of time rolling play dough. Testing it and trying it again to get the worm smaller.
After they rolled a worm, they tried to form it onto the letter of their name.
I’m not gonna lie, they didn’t like doing this.
I didn’t make them, but they kept asking me for help.
For ‘not liking’ it, they sure played with it for a long time, keeping at it.
Even Henry joined in and did his name.
And once their name was complete, they felt the need to keep rolling more worms and make designs around their name.
Perfect! They were strengthening their hands even more than I hoped! (And they said they didn’t like it…. )
It wasn’t until they were designing their names that Louis joined in too (he was busy doing the blocks in the shape activity again).
And can I brag about him?
He formed the letters of his name completely on his own. Rolled it out on his own. And didn’t tell me he didn’t like it either. Total win for a 3 year old!
Henry was pretty proud of his design. This was a sure winner.
So simple to add a piece of paper and markers to a classic activity like play dough to make it new again.
Strengthening Hands with Play Dough Names on handsonaswegrow.com
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