Arctic Playdough

A couple of weeks ago, T and I did a few activities around the theme of the Arctic. Playdough is always a popular choice of activity in our house and I love that it keeps both children entertained in different ways. I decided I would put together an Arctic Playdough invitation for them.

When it comes to playdough, I like to change things up a bit and so I don’t always put out the same things for them to use. As well as traditional playdough tools such as cutters and a rolling pin, we often use Loose Parts in our play. We have used things such as: natural objects; toy animals; matchsticks; lolly sticks; strings of beads; glass gems; body parts from Mr Potato Head; cupcake cases; candles; sequins; whole spices – as you can see, there is a wealth of options! Choosing different objects to use in their play inspires their imagination and is a catalyst for creativity.

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🌲❄️ ARCTIC PLAYDOUGH 🐇🐚 I LOVE playdough! It is hands down one of my kids favourite things to play with. We always make our own using the @imaginationtree recipe as a base, then adding colours, scents, spices and other things as desired! This current batch started its life in December with some cinnamon and cloves. It’s lost it’s scent now but it was brought back to life with some blue colouring and glitter! To make glittery dough you need quite a lot of glitter. Once I’ve got the glitter-level about right, I usually sprinkle some on the table and roll the dough in it so it looks extra appealing when the children come to play. The good thing about glitter in playdough is that it doesn’t end up all over the place so much as it does when you use it loose! One of the great things about playdough is that you can use it for almost any area of learning. For A today it was mainly a fine motor activity: squashing, pressing, and picking up small objects to push in to the dough. For T, she spent about an hour and a half creating some beautiful scenes: first an island, then a wedding. She was chatting away the whole time, telling the story and creating a dialogue between her characters. Head over to my stories to see some more pics!

A post shared by Becca Tooth (@pearsandchocolatesauce) on Jan 11, 2019 at 5:42am PST

For the Arctic Playdough, I added blue food colouring and a generous amount of silver glitter! As well as the dough, I put out:

• A collection of Arctic animals
• Blue and green glass gems
• Shells
• Some pieces of fir I’d saved from our Christmas tree
• Wooden stamps
• Strings of silver beads

T spent about an hour and a half completely absorbed in storytelling. She started off making an island and rescuing lots of the animals, and then chose to marry two of the animals and spent a long time building and decorating a space for the ceremony. She was talking all the while to herself, totally engrossed in her play, and bringing in some of the knowledge she’d acquired while learning about the Arctic.

For A, the activity was all about exploring and experimenting! Playdough is a great fine motor activity, as he spend a lot of time squashing, squeezing, pressing, and picking up small objects. He was also pushing things in to the dough and looking at the prints he had made when he took them away (encouraged by his big sister, who adores being his teacher!)

For more invitations to play using playdough, have a look at some of these other ideas!