Child Care Activities - Play-Doh as a Teaching Tool

We all know that kids love to get their hands messy in cookie dough, bread dough, play-doh. But how do you take the art of playing in dough to a higher level of teaching for a preschooler. Here are some ideas.

1. Teaching emotions - create faces out of play-doh and change the mouth or eye expression to depict particular emotions like happy, sad, mad, scared or shy. Ask your child to their own faces reflect what the play-doh face is doing.

2. Basic Fractions - create a pizza pie out of play-doh. Cut it into slices, first in half, then in quarters. That's about all you can expect a preschooler to grasp, but when you say "would you like me to cut your sandwich in half?", they will have a better understanding of what that means.

3. Counting - Roll the play-doh into balls and count with your child. Basic addition and subtraction can also be taught with older preschoolers

4. Colors - very obvious but sometimes overlooked; consider mixing colored dough with some white play-doh to teach light and dark

5. Gravity/Up & Down - create a bowling game out of play-doh. Angle a piece of cardboard or a plate in a slide fashion. Have our child roll the play-doh ball down the slide to knock over the pins.

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JoAnne Westcott is a work-at-home-mom from St. Louis, MO. Happily married with two preschool-aged daughters, finding new ways to play with and teach her girls has become her passion. JoAnne is an Independent Consultant with The Story Teller, maker of multi-sensory felt storyboards, dolls and books for kids.