Playdough

At the Family Center, children make playdough almost every week with their teachers. Besides being a lot of fun to make and play with, there is also learning happening in very age appropriate ways. Playdough is a wonderful chance for children to build muscle strength in their hands while expressing their creativity. Cookie cutters, rolling pins, forks, dull knives, and even gems and feathers can be fun additions to the playdough experience.

Here's our favorite playdough recipe!

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour

• 1 cup salt

• 2 cups water

• 4 teaspoons cream of tartar

• 4 tablespoons oil

• food coloring

Instructions:

1. Mix all the ingredients in a large saucepan.

2. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until mixture comes away from the sides.

3. Cool, play, enjoy.

4. If you store it in a tightly sealed container or Ziploc bag, this playdough will last quite awhile.

Here are just a few of the learning opportunities when making playdough:

• Children learn to make careful observations. The ingredients in playdough - flour, salt, cream of tartar - look very similar, and children will notice that things that look alike may feel and taste different.

• Children begin to understand sequence and order, following directions, and that words on a page can inform us (an important pre-reading skill) through following a recipe with pictures and simple words.

• Measuring and counting ingredients gives many opportunities for developing math concepts related to quantity and numeracy.

• Children see what happens when two or three colors are combined, helping them build observation skills and deepen their understanding of color mixing.

• The children work together as a group helping to measure, pour and stir as they wait for their turns, building social skills such as self regulation and patience.

• The conversation that happens as the children make the playdough offers many opportunites for language development, including vocabulary, a deeper understanding of how conversations work, and how questions can help us find answers.

• The playdough mixture changes dramatically as it's heated, and the transformation of the liquid mixture into a solid introduces scientific thinking and understanding.

• Perhaps most importantly at this age, the children develop pride in being part of a classroom community because they've created something through working as a team.

Questions you might hear teachers asking as the children make playdough:

• What do you notice about the recipe? How do the pictures help us?

• Do the water and flour automatically mix together?

• How do the water and flour look differently when they are mixed?

• Is the measuring cup we are using for this part bigger or smaller than the one we used for the last part?

• Does it look like playdough yet?

• What do you think will happen when we add the second color to the mixture?

• Do you notice anything different that happened once we started to mix the ingredience?

• How does the playdough feel in your hands?

• What do you wonder about the mixture?