Play dough and buttons

       

Play dough is such a wonderful play material. It can be used in so many ways. The children often like to roll it and cut it out with cookie cutters or stuff it into silicone cupcake cases to make their own cupcakes. Today, however, I decided to add some buttons to the invitation to play. I have written about their love of buttons before in this post where we used them for numeracy activities. Buttons are such a brilliant, inexpensive resource.

Today I gave the children the choice of coloured buttons or black and white. They chose the black and white to work with. I gave them each some play dough and told them they could roll it out and use it as a canvas for the beads to stick to.

       

They soon discovered that the buttons left lovely prints in the play dough and they had fun exploring this for some time. 

       

R used buttons to create marks all over his play dough.

     

D then started to print the marks in the shape of letters. Here is a capital 'I'.

      

D rolled out her play dough again and used the edge of the buttons to draw letters, numbers and a girl. I love how she had thought of using the edge of a button to do this.

      

R began to place buttons on the play dough and make a picture.

      

      

D started to make some flowers, one white, one black and one black and white.

      

The finished picture.

      

I love the way she placed black buttons on top of the white ones and vice versa to create an interesting effect.

      

R decided he wanted to make a sausage so he rolled up his play dough. Then, he stuck buttons all the way down in a line. I used this as an opportunity for some counting practice. I asked him if he could count them and he could! This is the first time I have heard him count to 10 in the right order, usually he skips a few. After we had practiced counting in English, we then practiced in Turkish. He needed more help with this, but practice makes perfect!

       

Finally, he got bored with the lay dough and started stacking the buttons instead. This is a great way of developing fine motor skills and balancing. He managed to stack about 8 before the stack toppled over. He enjoyed trying this over and over again, trying to build the tower higher each time. So much concentration on his face.

Do your children enjoy play dough?