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How to make easy and soft playdough

November 14, 2018

Posted by Rose Mengler

DIY

Ingredients

1 cup of Flour
1/2 cup of Salt
1 tbs Cream of Tartar
1 cup of boiling water
2 tbs Oil
Drops of food colouring of your choice.

Method

Mix all dry ingredients.
Add boiling water, oil and food colouring.
Stir into dough.
Knead gently until smooth.
Enjoy

Benefits of Play Dough

Growing up we all have explored play dough in some form. But outside of simple messy play, what exactly is play dough good for?
Play dough supports and assists it has a vast array of developmental learning and sensory benefits for children. As the children manipulate the play dough they strengthen their fine motor skills which will support the development of their pencil grip and improves pre-writing skills. These fine motor skills are the foundations in developing the children’s coordination in their hands and helps build on their dexterity abilities. Play dough has a calming effect by squishing and squashing the play dough it will help the children to express their emotions and is a great tool on rainy days when children are itching to go outside and have a run.

The skills children gain when playing with play dough:

To see the shape against the background of the table, a reading skill.
To see negative space when cookie cutter shapes are taken away.
To express feelings, squeezing and pounding.
To exercise their imagination and creativity.
To help express their emotions in a positive manner
That the amount of a substance remains the same, even when the shape changes.
To begin to initiate negotiating and sharing behaviors.
To use play to investigate, project and explore new ideas
To recognise their individual achievement.
To explore ideas and theories using imagination, creativity and play.
To demonstrate an increasing understanding of measurement to describe size, length, volume and capacity.
To explore concepts of shapes, relative sizes, big, small, length, height, etc.
To assist the children’s hands develop the strength, dexterity, and control needed to manipulate everyday items such as scissors, pencils, zippers, and buttons

In our classes at Crafty Chimps we always use play dough in every session, the tools in which we use to assist the children in their development with play dough are: