What child does not like playdough? Playdough is fun, colorful and easy to manipulate. It can also be purposeful and meaningful in the kindergarten classroom. Teachers either LOVE or DO NOT LIKE playdough in the classroom. Which one are you? I happen to be on the side of loving it. My experience has shown that playdough assists in fine motor skill strengthening, along with accomplishing academic goals through hands on learning. Keep reading for more on Purposeful Playdough For Little Learners.
Playdough In The Classroom
“Letters are abstract and just symbols in two dimensions, so they need to be discussed, thought about, played with and manipulated A LOT before they start to make sense for young children. (pg 9) Little Learners need multiple opportunities to differentiate between upper & lower case letters; understand that letters make up words, and words make up sentences; that rapid naming and developing phonemic sensitivity is crucial to decoding.” See Blog Post Summer Book Study 2022 – Know Better, Do Better – Chapter 1: Letter Recognition & Alphabetic Knowledge. Playdough in the classroom is one way to help meet these goals.
Supplies Needed
- Playdough – Store bought or homemade : Click here for an easy, inexpensive kool-aid playdough recipe as well as labels for the containers. And…it smells delicious!
- Anchor chart with rules and procedures for the station. Also include directions and pictures for cleaning up playdough.
- Provide interactive playdough mats for creating letter names or sight words. Check out these ones I made for my classroom! Here are the interactive alphabet playdough mats.
Creating A Playdough Station
These playdough mats were created to be interactive and can be used with dry erase markers as well as playdough. Kindergarteners can write and practice letters, beginning sounds, and even sentences. This extends the station to become multi-purposeful and more effective.
Teaching Your Students About This Station
- How to open playdough containers.
- How to roll the playdough into a ‘snake’ in order to make letters easily.
- How to use the playdough mats.
- Expectations and rules for the playdough, tools, and surrounding area.
- How to put away the playdough and tools.
- What to do if the playdough is dried out.
Activities At This Station
- Build letters with playdough
- Stamp letters in playdough
- Build sight words with playdough
- Stamp sight words with playdough
- Build student names with playdough
- Use playdough to make beginning/middle/ending sound letters
- Build CVC words with playdough
“Energizing” This Station
- Add new playdough
- Add new playdough mats
- Add new playdough tools
- Try magic playdough
- New task cards
These playdough mats were created to be interactive and can be used with dry erase markers as well as playdough. Kindergarteners can write and practice letters, beginning sounds, and even sentences. This extends the station to become multi-purposeful and more effective. I hope this helps give you new ideas and confidence in teaching with playdough this upcoming school year!
I hope this helps give you new ideas and confidence in teaching with playdough this upcoming school year!