Not Your Average Playdough Activity

Playdough activity idea from The Wigwam.

Playdough activities are a childhood favourite, but you don’t need tubs full of ready made playdough and plastic accessories.

At The Wigwam we try and make our activities a little bit different to create enhanced learning opportunities for children. Last week, our amazing staff team in our Tiny Turtles baby room made sensory playdough. This playdough activity involved mint scented playdough, providing the babies with an amazing sensory experience. Sensory play is so important for young children. Engaging a child in sensory play helps strengthen their brain development for learning, which enhances their memory and ability to complete more complex learning tasks (read more here). 

As well as treating them to the new smell of mint, we helped them with their physical development and coordination by using mallets and rolling pins.

The playdough activity for the older children at The Wigwam allowed them to explore weight, shapes and numbers. The children have shown a keen interest in learning more about these recently so we chose this activity to follow their interests and extend their learning.

Using antique weighing scales and natural resources to cut and group the playdough lots of conversations around numbers, weigh predictions and also extended to talking about what letters are in their names.

This playdough activity is an example of our move towards authentic resources, natural resources and using loose parts. You’ll notice that we are moving away from plastic and ‘toys’ that are designed with only one purpose in mind. Using loose parts and natural resources allows children to use their imagination. Resources that are not designed as a ‘toy’ can be anything the child wants it to be. Sparking their curiosity and imagination allows for the most wonderful learning opportunities. You can read more about loose parts in play here.

Mon 7th Oct