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.

Structured block play is what happens when a child tries to recreate a construction by consulting a model or blueprint.

It’s more constrained, but it calls on a particular skill set that is crucial for many tasks.

Kids must analyze what they see, perceive the parts that make up the whole, and figure out how the parts relate to each other.

For this activity, students were shown pictures of the straw house and brick house in the Three Little Pigs.

They were then asked to recreate these houses with Legos. Some students were given yellow Legos to represent the straw house, while others were given red Legos to represent the brick house.

Everyone enjoyed recreating the structures they saw in the story!

Children can find it very difficult to re-tell stories and even harder to make them up. This is particularly so if they have not had much experience with stories and story telling in the preschool setting.

There are a variety of ways to involve children with texts, and the use of ‘story trays’ is one that does not only spark an interest in reading but also involves much talk and discussion, which is why we include them in our curriculum!

A story tray is a tray containing a book, plus items associated with the story, which might include characters in the form of soft toys or puppets. There might also be a non-fiction book on a similar theme, which allows children to experience different types of text.

These items are used to help bring the story to life. They provide a visual and tactile stimulus that the children can use to take part in the telling or re-telling of the story.

Children of all abilities enjoy using them but they can be particularly useful in helping children who are not interested in reading, for whatever reasons, to enjoy books.

For this activity, we used a variety of items to re-tell the story of the Three Little Pigs. Each child was given one of these items, and as the story was read, they would add their item to the tray. Some of these items included green rice (for grass), yellow blocks (for the house made of straw), brown blocks (for the house made of sticks), red blocks (for the house made of bricks), plastic pigs, and a plastic wolf.

In the story of the Three Little Pigs, there are three houses: one made of straw, one made of sticks, and one made of bricks.

To help you little one better understand what the big bad wolf was up against, we created our very own houses!

Using play dough, straws, tiles, and sticks, we constructed three different houses just like the three little pigs! Our first set of materials included yellow play dough and plastic straws. Students were encouraged to stick the straws into the play dough to construct their flimsy houses.

Our second set of materials included brown play dough and craft sticks. Play dough is an easy substance because it can be quickly made and easily cleaned up. It also makes a fabulous adhesive. Your architects came up with so many designs, I wish I could include them all here!

Our third (and final) set of materials consisted of mosaic tiles (to simulate bricks) and orange play dough. This was tricky because they had to figure out how to best place them in the dough so that they could properly balance.

So…..why all of the building? Construction activities like these motivate creative thinking because of the planning that’s involved. Young builders have to do lots of problem solving. Secondly, our budding builders learn concepts of physics without saying it in such a scientific way. This occurs because of the patterns and divergent thinking  that is involved.

Given the opportunity to let it grow, you’ll see the creativity of what they’re building metamorphasize.

When children participate in the kitchen, they are learning important life skills.

With specific direction, they can create several tasty dishes, and enjoy the sense of autonomy that is fostered as a result.

These kinds of activities provide endless opportunities for building self-esteem and increasing vocabulary!

For this particular activity, we made pigs (with the assistance of a picture diagram) as we learned about the Three Little Pigs!

Our ingredients included strawberries, strawberry cream cheese, bananas, blueberries, and English muffins. Everyone enjoyed following the directions on the pictures, as they watched their pigs come to life!

Sorting is a beginning math skill. It may seem that a big chunk early math is about learning numbers and quantity, but there’s much more to it.

By sorting, children understand that things are alike and different as well as that they can belong and be organized into certain groups. Getting practice with sorting at an early age is important for numerical concepts and grouping numbers and sets when they’re older.

This type of thinking starts them on the path of applying logical thinking to objects, mathematical concepts and every day life in general. Studies have even been shown that kids who are used to comparing and contrasting do better in mathematics later on. For this activity, we practiced sorting different colored pom poms.

Using tweezers, we placed different colored pom poms on different colored trolls! Since we are learning about Billy Goats Gruff, this was a perfect complement to our curriculum!