Playdough Tutorial: How To Build Different Things With It

Play dough is now a recognized tool for child skill development and is known as an important method of imparting child education. It can be used to build different things that can widen the imagination of children and help them build themselves.

Even in our ordinary life, play dough can be used to transform into materials that are quite useful to us. A few techniques on how to build different things with it can help you a great deal.

Uses of Play Dough

• Fine motor skill development of the child
• Improving the focus, creativity, and imagination of the child
• Helping children learning to build things themselves
• Making utensils and lightweight articles
• Creative opportunities for older enthusiasts
• Stress reliever
• Hand exercises

Play dough is a significant alternative to different kinds of stress relievers that are available and help to improve your concentration and focus. It is also recommended to those who face difficulties in organized hand movements.

It brings a coordinated sense of movement to such patients. Baking and coloring playdough and then transforming them into different shapes and forms can help make different things useful for the home.

Building Different Things Using Play Dough

Down below is a list of things that you can make using play dough. Without further due, let’s begin.

1. Miniature Food Items

Miniature pizza, cakes, and delicacies that are pleasant to look at and also informative for the children as well can be easily built using play dough. They even look good as a part of the decoration of your living room as well.

Use plain white dough and roll it into a flatbread shape and place it on a small toy pan. You can use the red and yellow dough to cut into small pieces to give layers of red and mustard sauce. Use green and white dough again and cut them into slices to look like toppings.

Reading out the entire tutorial to your child while doing it can help them make things when they play with the dough without supervision.

Similarly, you can build cakes and sweet desserts in a similar way. Roll some white dough and frame with your hands to give them the shape of balls.

Make 2 or 3 more shapes this way and place them over one another. Use the brown or pink dough to cut into slices to use as icing.

2. Building Castles

Miniature castles can be built using play dough easily. The preferred color dough is taken and molded into rectangular shapes. 8-10 such shapes are formed and placed over one another in a similar way sand castles are made.

Another lump of dough is taken to form little cone-shaped domes to place over the castle towers. A stick can be divided into many parts and attached with papers cut in the shapes of flags.

Using a sharp end of sticks, windows and doors can be forged on the castle tower layers. The pink and purple colored dough can be used to build such castles to make them look more colorful and appealing.

3. Building Flowers And Fruits

Children can learn about different shapes and colors of flowers and fruits and learn their names while building them. To make flowers, take a piece of dough preferably red or pink colored and roll it into a flat circular shape. Fold the piece to make it into a spiral cone.

Make several such spiral cones and wrap them around one other. A flower can be thus formed using play dough.

Similarly, fruits can be built by grabbing a handful of colored dough and roll them to give them the shape of balls. Add details as per the fruit you’re building. This is an informative way of giving children some general knowledge regarding fruits and flowers and a lot of other things.

4. Alphabets

Children can learn alphabets by making the desired letters using play dough. This will help them in learning alphabets in a more interactive way.

For example, once they know how the letter C looks like, they can be told to make the alphabet using play dough by twisting it to form the letter C.

5. Leaf Prints

Playdough can be used to make leaf prints very easily. In such cases, a leaf can be used to place above the flatly rolled dough and pressed hard so that the patterns of the leaf is imprinted easily on the dough. Different colored leaf dough can be made in such a way.

6. Miniature Creatures

Playdough can be used to make miniature creatures. It is also an informative method for children to learn about different animals and how they look. For example, a fish can be built using a pinch of dough rolled into a flat oval shape.

The colorful dough can be used in small pinches to make triangular shapes for making the fins and placing them over the flat body. A fork is used to make scales on the body and the tail. Small dots can be used to make the eyes.

A caterpillar can be built using small balls by rolling them into circles. The balls are joined to one another longitudinally, and black dots are given as eyes. A fork is used to make the mouth and the details on the body.

Points To Keep In Mind While Using It

• Provide play dough to be played by children at least two years of age.
• If you’re using homemade play dough, then consider only flour, water, and essential oil to prepare it. Avoid commercial ones as they may contain oils not suitable for children below 2 years of age.  Always check the ingredients before handing over to your child.
• If hardened over time, the dough can be softened by adding water to it one drop at a time or wrapping it with a damp towel and leaving overnight.

Conclusion

Coming to an end, it can be said that, play dough is indeed an important educative and fun tool for children in the pre-school age. Building different things with it can be beneficial in many ways. It not only improves the creative thinking of the child but can also give them a sense of curiosity and knowledge.

 Teaching how to build different things with the playdough, you can easily help your child to improve his imagination and increase his focus on learning. The child can learn to make many different forms through his imagination, and it is thus educative.