How to Teach an Entire Preschool Curriculum with Play Doh

I’m a little obsessed with education (being a former teacher) but honestly, I don’t even think that matters – I think most parents are obsessed with education. Watching our children learn and grow is by far one of the best parts of being a parent!

Like a lot of you I am always looking for new things to incorporate into our day that promotes learning, but I’m not talking about spending hours researching, prepping, and implementing an activity – only for my 3-year-old to spend less than 5 minutes engaged with it and then wanting to move on to the next thing.

That is why I love play doh activities because the learning possibilities are absolutely endless. It’s engaging and super easy to set up and clean up (YES PLEASE!).

We always buy this play-doh. Its extremely inexpensive and comes with so many different colors.

At this stage, my educational philosophy is: Let them be kids! Let them play, relax, get dirty, use their imagination, and so on. BUT I also want to weave in the foundational aspects of learning such as reading, writing, and math. I want to do this through play – yes, learn by playing is what we do in our household and here is how we do it using play-doh.

Reading

One reading activity we do is forming letters with the play-doh to help with letter recognition (trigger your inner play-doh creativity to make the different letters).

Make sure once they have recognized the letter, you make the sound of the letter as well. Repetition is key when learning.

Another activity to promote letter/sound recognition while playing with play-doh is to constantly ask your child what letter does _____ start with. For example: “What color is this play-doh?” BLUE “What letter does blue start with? ‘buh, buh, blue?” B! “What letter does play-doh start with?” (Maybe even pointing to the letter P on the container.)

It’s important to let your child kind of lead what they are interested in. If they decide they want to make a farm scene out of the play-doh, you can take this opportunity to again teach letter/sound recognition:

R: I’m making a pig!

Me: Ohhh what letter does pig start with? Puh Puh Pig?

R: P!

*Rainbow confetti falls from the sky*  – kidding but you get the point.

Teaching children by doing these different activities is important but one of the most important acts is just talking to them. That is going to help their learning and really promote their vocabulary as well, which is extremely important to the learning to read process.

Math

My daughter loves making baby meatballs with the play-doh, which is perfect to learn different math objectives.

Learning comparing objects such as “Which of these two meatballs is bigger? Which one is smaller? How many meatballs do you have all together? What if I took 1 meatball away, how many meatballs do you have left? Can you put all your meatballs in order from biggest meatball to smallest meatball?”

Again, go with your child’s creativity – if they want to make sticks or noodles – all these conversations can take place interchanging the word ‘meatball’ for whatever item they want to make with their play-doh.

Like I mentioned with the letters, you can trigger your inner creativity and try your best to make different shapes such as square, circle, triangle, etc. and introduce or test your child’s knowledge with shapes.

Another math activity is starting to teach them patterns. Again, since my daughter loves makes meatballs – I would have her make several meatballs using different colors then create a pattern with those meatballs

Pink, Pink, Blue, Pink, Pink, Blue, Pink…. “What color comes next in our pattern?”

This next activity helps children recognize the different currency coins and their value. I don’t know what child doesn’t love using objects while playing play-doh. I hide coins in the play-doh and pretend that it’s buried treasure and she has to find it.

Once she finds it we talk about what the name of that coin is and how much money it’s worth.

Writing

For a child to learn how to write they need to exercise and improve their fine motor skills. These are small muscles involving the coordination of their hands and eyes.

To be honest, the absolute best way to promote fine motor skills and writing in your preschooler is to let them JUST PLAY with play-doh. Playing with play-doh will help strengthen and foster the muscles needed to write. Playing with play-doh will strengthen their pincher grasp, arm strength and promote hand and eye coordination.

All of these increasing a child’s fine motor skill abilities.

Additional Fun Activities

Other great things that can be taught by playing with play-doh include scissor skills (using scissors to cut up play-doh) and learning to cut with utensils (giving children plastic utensils while playing with play-doh) **side note: these activities will also help their improve their fine motor skills.

Teaching our children and having conversations with them while playing with play-doh is so important, however, one of the most important aspects that can be implemented while playing with play-doh is fostering the independent, creative, learning they get out of the activity when doing it by themselves.

We have a basket with all the play-doh and supplies in it. This is easily accessible to our children. They get it out and play with it all the time by themselves. Using their imagination to create a farm or cooking up different foods at their restaurant.

I hope this sparked some good ideas that you can go and implement with your young ones! They are only this little for such a short period of time. I feel like we blink and they have grown. We need to remind ourselves to set aside the distractions, physically and mentally, and be present with our children as much as we can!