What is soft and colorful and can squish through your fingers? The answer is play dough. The invention of play dough dates back to the 1930s. Originally it was invented to be wallpaper cleaner.

However, after a classroom of children began using it as a modeling compound, it was reformulated and introduced to the Cincinnati schools in the mid-1950s as play dough. Today play dough can be found in almost every preschool and kindergarten classroom. Bringing play dough into a learning center offers a variety of educational opportunities.

It is a great, inexpensive educational tool that can be used to foster creativity, literacy, and math skills. And most importantly of all, kids love play dough. There is something magical about rolling, patting, and squishing the brightly colored dough with your fingers. For this activity, we used play dough to create our very own ants!

To begin with, we talked about what an insect is. Students learned that one thing that makes insects different from other bugs, is the number of legs they have. They were told that ants, like other insects, have six legs. Your little one also learned about what an antenna is. Within the ant colony, these antenna are used to communicate. Following a brief discussion, students created their own ants with play dough, black pipe cleaners, and googly eyes!

Ants create nests in many places, but in North America their nests are mostly constructed underground or in fallen logs.

Ants are constantly excavating their underground homes and carrying the soil up to the surface.

They can create large mounds of soil and sand outside their nest entrances.

Some ants build up their mounds with sticks and pine needles and bits of grass.

This visible part is called an “ant hill” or an “ant mound.” Often a single nest will have more than one opening. For this activity, we created our own ant hills out of kinetic sand!

Many preschoolers are able to use numbers arbitrarily; pretending to count, or mixing up numbers and letters.

From about the age of four, preschoolers will begin to show one to one correspondence, or the ability to count objects correctly, as well as recognize most numbers 0-9 and sometimes recreate numerals when given an example.

As with many preschool skills, it is important for young students to be given many different opportunities for to see, touch and use numbers throughout the day.

Including numbers in thematic play is one way that they can begin to recognize numbers.

For this activity, your little one participated in a sorting/numeral recognition activity that tied in with our ant theme.

Using manipulatives and pictures of grass (with numbers printed on them), your little one practiced sorting and matching groups of ants with their corresponding numeral.

Since we were working on numbers 10-20 this week, we used these numbers in this activity.