Holiday Play Dough

This blog entry is dedicated to the brave teachers and children of Sandy Hook Elementary School and is written in solidarity with my fellow Bloggers for Sandy Hook. I hope that as you explore this entry and the rest of my blog you find many ideas for how to engage in creative play and exploration with your children and make every moment in our lives count.

Play dough is one of our favourite activities - helping children to strengthen their fine motor skills and encourage creativity and oral language through play. Because my children have been so interested in the holiday decorations and art materials in the house, I thought it would be fun to combine them into a festive play dough experience!

We started with some simple ornaments added to a giant ball of play dough! Caleb was eager to explore how he could decorate his cut outs (tree, angel, star) by using the garland and miniature ornaments.

As he did, he noticed that they left interesting prints in the dough, and he used these to further decorate his cutouts.  Here the prints become the ornaments on the tree!

I also added some holiday foil cutouts, sparkly silver foam balls, small treasures, and bottles of glitter and encouraged him to explore how these materials could be used with the dough.

He was thrilled to have control over how to use the materials - sprinkling glitter to his heart's content and decorating with the treasures!

His sister joined in and they used the cutters to make more prints in the dough, adding to the design.

What a beautiful masterpiece! This activity is so easy to do and so much fun! A word of warning to the faint of heart - the glitter is messy and will get everywhere but seeing as it's a time of holiday and cheer, who doesn't want their house filled with glitter!