Using play dough (or in fact any type of dough!) with young children is beneficial in so many ways. The malleable properties of play dough make it fun for investigation and exploration as well as building up strength in the tiny hand muscles and tendons, making them ready for pencil and scissor control later on.

As part of simple, tactile play – it can be squashed, squeezed, rolled, flattened, chopped, cut, scored, raked, punctured, poked and shredded!

Each one of these different actions aids fine motor development in a different way, not to mention hand-eye coordination and general concentration.

And as soon as you add another element to it, the list of benefits and creative play possibilities continue to grow!

For this activity, we created trolls out of play dough, pipe cleaners, and plastic eyes. It is for one thing for a child to read a book – it is another for them to find creative ways to identify with the characters. Enjoying the tactile benefits of play dough does just this.