Skip to Content

Preschool Playdough Mats & Activities

Sharing is caring!

playdough pile

(photo credit: jimmiehomeschoolmom)

Playdough is so much more than just squishy-gooey fun for little fingers. Playing with playdough is beneficial to developing and strengthening fine motor skills. Essentially, playing with playdough can directly impact your little one's writing skills! (I know, I know, it can be messy. With a few guidelines, you can let your little one squish playdough to their heart's content.)

Playdough Guidelines At Our House:

  1. Always at the table!
  2. Use a placemat
  3. If you purposefully throw it on the floor, we put your playdough away.

I have found that little ones don't really have the dexterity to sculpt playdough into complex shapes and can get frustrated. One of the things they can do really well though is make "snakes" and roll a "ball". Using these two things, we can harness the educational power of playdough through playdough mats!

ABC Playdough Mats

Playdough Mat Ideas:

  • Letter Outlines (Here's a great printable from Homeschool Creations!)
  • Number Outlines (Another printable from Homeschool Creations)
  • Shape Outlines
  • Child's Name
  • Counting Sets
  • Simple addition or subtraction facts (also known as "Number Sentences" in Kindergarten)
  • Spelling Words

Cutting Playdough with a Plastic Knife

Other Playdough Activities We Like:

  • Cookie Cutters of all kinds
  • Practicing cutting with a plastic knife
  • Practicing cutting with child-safe scissors (with lots of supervision!)

Here is a little trick to help extend the life of  your Playdough Mats: Slide the playdough mat into a plastic page protector. This will prevent the playdough from sticking to your playdough mat paper and will make it easy to wipe clean. Also, did you know that you can write on page protectors with a dry-erase marker and wipe it clean? Aha! Now our playdough mats are multi-purpose!

Playdough Mat Resources:

That should be a great starting point for you with making playdough time a powerful learning tool!

Sharing is caring!

10 Ways to Boost the Power of Playdough | Happy Brown House

Tuesday 16th of October 2012

[...] Use playdough mats to target certain learning [...]

Top Ten Favorites From The Archives… | Happy Brown House

Tuesday 22nd of February 2011

[...] Playdough Mats [...]

crystal & co

Wednesday 3rd of November 2010

this is awesome! playdough also helps build hand dexterity for scissor cutting!

RedMango

Monday 18th of October 2010

Very nice post!

Dawn

Saturday 2nd of October 2010

love the mat idea-i'll have to check them out my son loves to try to cut the playdough with play scissors . i also have a pet peeve about the mixing the playdough colors-my girls don't though so we end up with lots of funky colors

Sara

Sunday 3rd of October 2010

Ha! I think the other word for my pet peeve would be "anal retentive". Glad I'm not the only one!