There are SO many reasons why playdough should be a staple in every home with little ones. I’ll share with you why you should use playdough to enhance your child’s creativity and learning skills. Plus, I’ll hopefully convince you that playdough mats are a great option to learn creativity, fine motor, and even math skills for preschoolers.
Benefits of Using Playdough
I’ll just name a few benefits of using playdough with your preschoolers or young ones. Here is a simple list of why playdough is a wonderful and affordable tool to have around the house at all times:
- Fine Motor Skills – Developing those small muscles in the hands over time will prepare them for their education in the near future. If you think about it, they do a lot more than just squish — it’s fun to cut, flatten, pinch, slam, poke, and manipulate as much as they can!
- Pre-Writing Tool – Playdough is excellent as a pre-writing skill. As mentioned above, those small muscle movements are getting stronger and preparing them for their future of writing.
- Multi-sensory Experience – You are using most of your senses with edible playdough including smell, taste, touch, and see. This is perfect for kinesthetic learners.
- Creativity – Playdough engages your child into creativity mode and gives your child an outlet to create his own masterpieces.
Play Dough Mat Printables
And, I have good news — there’s a free tool available for you below to download today that encourages fine motor, creativity and math skills all at the same time. You’ll want to grab my free printable set of Ice Cream Playdough Mats!
Need more playdough recipes that are easy and exciting to make? You’ll find a ton of holiday and special playdough recipes right here!
Playdough Mat Instructions
Now we are ready to find out what all the fuss is about with our free printable playdough mats! These playdough mats make great math helpers for addition. All your child has to do is follow the instructions (with a little help from mom) and count out the correct amount of sprinkles for the ice cream.
Not only will they strengthen their addition math skills in a positive way, but their critical thinking skills come into play as well! Creating their own math problem and answering the math equation gives them a great sense of accomplishment!
For example, as you can see above, there are easy to follow instructions on each playdough mat. The step by step instructions will ask your child to make a number of sprinkles. Then, they create a number sentence based on this number. If there are 4 sprinkles, how many ways can your child make a math equation that equals four using addition? It’s a great way to introduce math problems in a practical, more logical way.
Have you ever used a 10 frame to teach numbers? In the image above, you can use the 10 frame worksheet using playdough. Simply ask your child to make playdough shapes and place that many shapes on each number frame. It’s that simple? It’s a great way to show your child just how many numbers we use in our 10 decimal system.
In addition, you can use the 10 frame worksheet to teach counting. You can cut out the frames, mix them up, and ask your child to put them in order. Then, add some fun playdough shapes to encourage counting for each frame.
Free Ice Cream Playdough Mats
Are you ready to download your 10 free playdough mats? Try these out, you can’t go wrong with teaching your child all of the essential skills he or she needs during their preschool year.
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