Lots of playdough fun for kids, including printing playdough mandalas, making the layers of the Earth with playdough, and color mixing with playdough.
I made a new batch of no-cook playdough the other day. Three batches in fact. One red (okay, pink), one blue, and one yellow. And Maia, Daphne, and their friend Emily, descended on the table for an afternoon of playdough fun.
They each explored the dough differently to begin with.
Playdough Fun – Different Ideas for Exploring Playdough
- Animal modeling
- Color mixing
- Earth balls
- Mandalas
- Texture prints
- And more!
Playdough Animals
Daphne poked in toothpicks to make some sort of playdough animal.
Color Mixing with Playdough
Maia used the playdough for color mixing, something we’ve done in the past a bit. She worked two primary colors together in her hands to make the secondary colors. And then created a color wheel of sorts on top of a lego base of all things.
Playdough Earth Balls
And Emily added layers of playdough around an initial ball, creating a sphere of concentric color. She cut it in half to reveal the circle layers (much like the layers of the Earth) of blue, green, pink, and yellow.
The other two were so impressed and inspired that all three started making the multi-colored dough balls. Lots of them.
They started by shaping a ball of one playdough color. Then they would roll out second, third, and fourth colors with the rolling pin (or smash it flat with a ruler if one of the others had the rolling pin) and wrap these layers around the ball of playdough, one at a time.
Of course, once the concentric circles of playdough color were created, they had to slice them each in half the reveal the beautiful layers.
Eventually, one of them took a rolling pin to one of the sphere halves and rolled it out to display the concentric circles on a flattened plane.
Which they all thought was cool so they started doing that to more of them.
Texture Prints in Playdough
The playdough table was abandoned when Emily left for the day, but we all returned to it later and started making mandala designs in the flattened playdough disks by poking in the buttons and beads that were on the table as well as printing designs in the playdough with the buttons, toothpicks, a marker cap, and the end of a Fort Magic construction piece.
Playdough Mandalas
Until we had a table-full of colorful playdough mandalas!
The best part is that all that playdough fun was kid-led using my standard playdough setup of a few dough balls and some poke-ins. Which goes to show that you never know where a simple art invitation will end up!
More Playdough Fun for Kids
- 15+ Creative Playdough Ideas for Kids
- Hearts & Lace Prints in Playdough
- Playdough Ideas for Kids :: 39 Ways to Play & Learn with Playdough
- Small World Playdough Play for Kids
- Easy Pumpkin Faces with Playdough
- Playdough Monsters with Poke-Ins
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