Playdough is beneficial to children’s development in so many ways. With autumn approaching why not make this autumn-inspired pumpkin playdough to develop your children’s:
- Fine Motor Skills
- Math’s and Literacy development
- Science and Discovery
- Imagination and Creativity
- Sensory development
What you need to make pumpkin playdough
- Half a cup of flour
- Half a cup of salt
- 1 spoon of vegetable oil
- 1 tablespoon of allspice
- 1 spoon of cream of tartar
- Jug of warm water
- Orange food colouring
Method
All you need to do is add all the ingredients together, adding the warm water bit by bit until your ingredients become dough. If your dough becomes too sticky you may have to add more flour.
It’s important that the children get the opportunity to take part in the process of making the playdough. This encourages children to understand the process of how the pumpkin playdough is made along with developing their physical skills. This will also support the children in asking lots of questions.
The actual act of making the playdough together with your child can lead to lots of questioning and prediction skills. Here we have some solid materials (flour, salt etc) to which we are going to add some liquids (oil, water.) What do you think will happen? What can we make?
Your child gets to explore and observe the changing state of materials in a hands-on way, and be filled with wonder as the bowl of unrelated ingredients comes together to form a sticky, then smooth and squishy ball of dough! We often take these things for granted but in the eyes and hands of a child, that’s quite some transformation!
Following a recipe and instructions, counting out cups, stirring and mixing and just being able to spend time on a collaborative project with an adult are all meaningful and important experiences too!
You can encourage your children to go out on a nature walk to find some loose parts material to add to the playdough to enhance their play, such as pine cones, leaves, twigs and conkers.