Playdough is a favorite with most kids. Here is a great project to keep kids entertained with playdough as they make animals. Kids Activities Blog hopes your little one (and you) enjoy this indoor fun activity.
Playdough
Our preschool lesson themes are based on books and topics that Bear {4 yrs} has chosen to make sure that he is interested and invested in learning. His latest choice was jungle animals. Due to the freezing weather outside, we can’t go to the zoo to see animals that reside in the jungle. So, we decided to bust out the Playdough and make our own!
Make Animals
The materials we used were:
- Tan, orange, and black Playdough
- Twine
- Orange, yellow, white, brown, and black craft pom poms
- Different-sized google eyes
- Animal print pipe cleaners
To set up our preschool activities, I have started using a method that I saw on The Iowa Farmer’s Wife. I have been placing them on inexpensive baking sheets from the dollar store. Not only do they help keep small items from rolling off of the table, they also allow me to group materials in a way that is appealing and inviting to my little learner.
It’s rare that I actually do my own projects alongside Bear because he tries to imitate me and gets frustrated. Usually I just watch, comment, and ask questions. But this activity was just too much for me to pass up and we each did our own thing.
Indoor Fun
Rolling out the dough into balls, cutting the pipe cleaners, and manipulating the small eyes gave Bear some good small motor practice and a sensory experience all rolled into one.
After we were done with our jungle animal Playdough creations, Bear and I gave them fun names. He named his “Cat-erfly” because it was a cat that could fly {do you see the wings?} We worked together to name mine the “Sniffer-ger” because it had a huge nose and a tiger print tail.
A great literacy extension for this activity would be for your little learner to narrate or write their own story about their created animals to include: how they live, what they eat, their habitats, etc.
More Kids Activities
Don’t let you child have all the fun with the playdough! We hope you both had fun learning to make animals together. For more creative kids activities like this, you might be interested in these ideas:
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Aww! this is a nice play and it’s safe for children too.
Very nice activity for the kids. They would like this anyway but this activity is good to improve the motor skills of kids’ fingers.