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No Cream of Tartar Playdough Recipe

What could be luckier than this sparking green St. Patricks Day Homemade Playdough Recipe without cream of tartar? Easy to make, just a handful of kitchen ingredients and a pinch of glitter from the craft box and you have a wonderful seasonal activity for the kids to enjoy. Add a pile of fake gold coins and they will get a lot of mileage from the playin’ in the green, forget the wearin’ of it! 

As always playdough is a great open-ended activity that offers a chance for your child to expand their imagination, work on fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, it makes the perfect medium for learning colors, letters, and shapes, and can be manipulated in so many ways. But most of all its just fun!

You will need:

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup of water
  • ¼ cup of salt
  • 1 Tablespoon oil (any)
  • 3 teaspoons of lemon juice
  • Green food coloring
  • Green glitter
  • Golden coins- optional

Directions:

In a large saucepan combine flour, water, salt, oil, lemon juice, and food coloring.

Stir frequently cooking on medium heat until dough begins to clump together and stick to spoon in the center.

Remove from heat and allow to cool until comfortable to the touch.

Knead playdough for 30-35 seconds, working in the glitter at this time to give it some magical shine. If desired add a couple of drops of peppermint extract or essential oil to give it another sensory aspect to enjoy.

Store your playdough in an airtight container in the fridge when not in use and you should get weeks of use from it.

Use your green glittery play dough to create a shamrock.

Hide plastic gold coins in it and let your child find and count them all. Have your child make numbers with the playdough and then count out that many objects such as the gold coins

60 thematic, hands-on activities to build fine motor control skills for Spring!

March Themes: Read Across America, St. Patrick’s Day, Butterflies & Bullfrogs, Dragonflies.

60 thematic, hands-on activities to build fine motor control skills in March! These thematic activity pages are perfect for your March learning centers. Great for early finishers, take-home resources, or as a tutoring binder you can bring on the go!

Geoboard Patterns for Valentine's Day

Geoboard Math Mat

This geoboard mat tasks students with creating a picture, then adding more bands to create the second picture. Students answer basic counting and addition problems.

Geoboard Shape Mat

This geoboard mat tasks students with creating the more difficult picture, then coloring the black line example. Students are then asked to identify the different shapes they see.

Create, Color, & Draw Activity Pages

Students are asked to create a picture, color the black-line example, and then to copy the drawing onto the blank grid.These are great for older students who do not need the full geoboard mat.

Geoboard of the Day (Easy Follow-Up Worksheet)

This simple version asks students to choose one of their pictures to draw, and answer the questions. Questions cover counting and shapes.

Geoboard of the Day (Hard Follow-Up Worksheet)

This harder version asks students to draw, write, count, tally, graph, compare, and find the shapes. This is great for expanding key math skills.

Geoboard Task Cards

These colorful task cards are great for creating your own math centers. Students chose a card, create the picture and answer the question. Follow-up with one of the worksheets below.

This Geoboard Activity Pack includes a variety of thematic activities and worksheets for Valentine’s Day!! With simple, differentiated learning opportunities, this set will soon become one of your favorite winter resources. Students work on key math, and logic skills while building these fun geo board pictures. This set not only includes geoboard mats, but geoboard task cards, and follow-up worksheets as well.

Geoboard Mats
Geoboard Worksheets

What’s Included:

For each of the ten Valentine’s Day designs, you’ll receive a variety of different geoboard activities. These activities have been designed to help you provide your students with challenging activities based on ability level.

Valentine's Day Playdough Recipe

Strawberry Vanilla Valentines Playdough in The Kitchenaid

Whip up this easy homemade playdough recipe without turning on your stove and use your mixer to keep your hands clean and free of food coloring!  Amazingly scented and tinted homemade playdough is the stuff kids dreams are made of, grab a few pantry ingredients and let’s get started making it for your little Valentine.

This homemade playdough recipe also makes a great gift for the class party or just for one on one fun at home with you and your little one. Cut the dough in half before adding scent and food coloring and use strawberry and vanilla extracts, or other extracts and oils to create multiple scents and colors.

Ingredients:

  • 2 ½  cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 ½ cups of water
  • ⅔  cup of salt
  • 2 Tablespoons  Cream of Tartar
  • 2 Tablespoon coconut oil
  • 1 Tablespoon Strawberry extract
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract.
  • Red food coloring

Directions:

Place dry ingredients in mixer and combine on low.

Heat water in the microwave for 3-4 minutes or until boiling.

Slowly pour hot water into dry mixture and mix on low until everything is evenly combined, add a bit more flour if needed, mixture should be just slightly tacky but not sticky.

Mix in strawberry and vanilla extract along with red or pink food coloring until you reach your desired shade and scent strength.

Allow it to cool until it can be handled comfortably.

Include all sizes of heart-shaped cookie cutters, mini cookie cutters, plastic knives or craft sticks for cutting and rolling pins for  Valentines themed open-ended play.

This Valentine’s Day Playdough is super soft and when you scent it with strawberry-vanilla extract, your kiddos are in for a sweet sensory treat!

You can even make a bouquet of roses for Valentine’s Day! Roll dough into “snakes”, flatten and then coil them up to create these sweet little rosettes.

The open-ended play possibilities are endless! Your kiddos can even make hearts, roses, strawberry treats and more!

Store your playdough in the fridge in an air-tight container.

Pair up this scented dough with our Valentine’s Day playdough mats! We have over 60 hands-on activities designed to build fine motor skills available in our February Fine Motor Pack.

Tracing Snowman Shapes Activity

With winter around the corner, you’ll want to stock your preschool classroom with fun, thematic activities for your students. We’ve got hundreds of free winter preschool printables available on our website. From arctic animals to Christmas activities and games, to nutcrackers, snowflakes and now snowmen!

Snowman Tracing Worksheets

But these aren’t just any snowmen! These snowmen come in all sorts of shapes and sizes! Our free snowman tracing worksheets are great for preschoolers who are learning to identify shapes by sight and by name. Each page features a silly shaped snowman for reference.

You can place these pages inside a page protector and have students write with a dry erase marker. That way they can be reused again and again simply by wiping off the marker. Alternatively, you can create your own shape manipulatives using pipe-cleaners and have children place the shapes on the correct spot.

Free Winter Preschool Printables

If you are really feeling festive, try using a handful of mini-marshmallows, red hots, peppermints, mini-poms or even playdough. Encourage children to place the manipulatives around the outline of the shape. You could even count how many of each object was needed to complete the shape and compare sizes.

Tracing Snowman Worksheets

If your students are headed home for winter break, this would be a fun take home activity you could send with them! You could print these pages smaller than a full sheet and make them a little booklet for students to complete over Christmas Break. For extra fun, have them turn each shape on the page into their own snowman by adding eyes, nose, arms, a scarf, and other features. The possibilities are endless with this fun set of snowman tracing pages!

Tracing Snowman Shapes Title Page

If you are making a little take-home booklet for your students, use this free cover page!

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Diamond Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a diamond! Students trace all of the diamonds then practice writing the word below.

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Rectangle Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a rectangle! Students trace all of the rectangles then practice writing the word below.

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Square Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a square! Students trace all of the squares then practice writing the word below.

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Circle Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a circle! Students trace all of the circles then practice writing the word below.

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Star Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a star! Students trace all of the stars then practice writing the word below.

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Oval Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of an oval! Students trace all of the ovals then practice writing the word below.

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Triangle Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a triangle! Students trace all of the triangles then practice writing the word below.

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Heart Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a heart! Students trace all of the hearts then practice writing the word below.

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Hexagon Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of a hexagon! Students trace all of the hexagons then practice writing the word below.

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Octagon Tracing Worksheet

This snowman is in the shape of an octagon! Students trace all of the octagons then practice writing the word below.

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Fall Pumpkin Math Mats

Counting is a skill that all preschoolers need to work on. Not just counting on fingers, but recognizing one-to-one correspondence, that the number they are counting is represented with an object. With this free pumpkin candy counting game, your child can have fun while learning basic counting and addition skills.

Free Pumpkin Printables

With our free pumpkin printables these set works well with any fall or harvest theme. If you’re doing an “On the Farm” theme, this would work very well with that as well. There are many different ways you can use this free printable math mat, so you’re sure to keep students engaged with each method.

How to play Pumpkin Math Mat

Print and laminate the math mat. Depending on your student’s ability, give him or her one die or two dice. Tell your student to roll the dice. Students should then add the corresponding number of pumpkins to the tractor. Clear the board and play again!

Halloween Candy Printable

This free quick printable is great to pull out when you need to give your preschooler something to keep busy with. If you don’t have candy pumpkins you can also use candy corn as a substitute. The Pumpkin Truck Counting printable can be used as a busy bag, you can just put the candy and the dice in a bag with the truck sheet. Then pull it out for your child whenever!

Whether you use the printable pumpkins, buttons, candy corn, or candy pumpkins, this is a simple way to add some hands-on learning activities to your classroom without the prep-work!

Pumpkin Math Mat

Print and laminate or store in a page protector for reuse.

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Fine Motor Skills

WHAT ARE FINE MOTOR SKILLS?

Fine Motor activities are intentional in the building of small motor control muscles found inside our hands. Think of things like pencil control, grip strength…etc. These key muscles need development for future tasks such as writing, typing, tying shoes and other small motor movements that require fine precision. The skills required to perform these small muscle tasks are called fine motor skills.

FINE MOTOR SKILLS FOR PRESCHOOLERS

Developing fine motor skills seems simple enough however, setting up a fine motor learning center in your classroom is more than just printing out a few handwriting worksheets and calling it good. Many students might not have the grip or control to properly form the letters, which can lead to frustration or bad habits. This is why it’s important to present students with many different fine motor activities that work a variety of muscles, building up the skills they will need in their kindergarten year.

WHAT ARE SOME FINE MOTOR SKILLS PRESCHOOLERS SHOULD LEARN?

At a young age, preschoolers need to begin building grip and control as well as hand-eye coordination. You’ll want to preset your student with a variety of different and fun activities, but don’t get too overwhelmed by the process. Setting up a learning center station doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, there are many Fine Motor Activity Packs available in our TPT store to help get you started! These packs cover tracing, pencil grip, handwriting, small motor movements, play-dough/manipulation, pincer grasp, cutting/pasting, prepositional movement, listening skills, sign language, and so much more!

Fine Motor Alphabet

Teaching the alphabet while working on fine motor skills is a great way to double the learning in preschool. These activities are designed to encourage letter recognition, letter formation, beginning letter sounds, and more.

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Fine Motor Holidays & Seasons

Provide your students with an entire year of thematic, fine motor activities! These no-prep activity packs make your monthly lesson planning a snap. Each month, you'll have over 60 hands-on, skill-building activities for your learning centers.

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Fine Motor Task Cards

Task cards and fine motor skills go hand-in-hand with this growing collection of fine motor task cards. Each activity pack includes colorful task cards, and black and white follow-up worksheets and activities to expand learning.

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Easter Dot to Dot Preschool Worksheets

Easter is the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ! We have a huge variety of Christian Easter Resources on our sister sites. Today we are adding this fun set of Easter Dot-to Dot Mathtivity Worksheets.

I’m calling these “Mathtivity” worksheets because these are not your average dot-to-dot activivty pages. Each page has a follow-up math activity intended to help your little ones develop key preschool and kindergarten math skills.

Each dot to dot for Easter has between 15-30 dots, making them fantastic for building math skills with these higher numbers. Young students don’t often have to opportunity to work with numbers higher than 10 or 15, so these Mathtivity worksheets are designed to fill in that gap, and expose children to the possibility that they can expand their math skills.

With 10 unique dot to dot mathtivity worksheets, this set is sure to be a hit with your students! Use them as take home assignements, math literacy centers, work for early finishers etc.. The ten worksheets cover tally marks, addition, subtraction, framing, place value, inequalities, one-to-one correspondance and more!

Easter Dot to Dot Pages

Easter Dot to Dot Coloring Page: Easter Basket

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students how to frame numbers.

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Preschool Easter Dot to Dot Printables: Bunny

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students how to count with tally marks.

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Easter Dot to Dot Pages: Easter Flower

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students how to represent numbers on a grid.

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Easter Dot to Dot Coloring Pages: Easter Egg

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students place value.

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Easter Dot to Dot Pages: Easter Egg

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students addition.

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Easter Dot to Dot Coloring Page: Marshmallow Bunny

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students subtraction.

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Easter Dot to Dot Coloring Page: Easter Egg

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students how to write.

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Christian Easter Dot to Dot: Easter Cross

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students about odd numbers.

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Preschool Easter Dot to Dot Printables: Jelly Bean

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students how to compare numbers

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Free Easter Dot to Dot Worksheets: Easter Egg

This is a free printable Easter dot to dot page for teaching students how to draw items to represent a number.

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