We have recently started to discover the joys that playdough can bring.  I have avoided The Lovely Stuff up to this point, as they (and for this, read mostly ‘Little Man’) still like to put things in their mouths.  Not easy to manage when you have two of them doing it.

Little Miss was a bit reluctant to touch it to start with (she doesn’t like food on her face either!), but we have been playing with it fairly regularly.  She has become more and more relaxed about it, and more willing to have a squash and a squeeze.  They have enjoyed making marks in the playdough with various things, such as duplo bricks and toy cars, but the best thing so far has definitely been pasta.

Sometimes I gave them a few different types of pasta at the same time, so they could explore the different properties of each.  They enjoyed pushing them into the playdough and looking at the different marks they can make.

Sometimes I gave them one type at a time, to let them explore each one thoroughly.  Here, they’re using just penne pasta, and we started talking about hedgehogs!

They’ve also enjoyed pushing spaghetti into their playdough.  Little Miss did it very carefully, and the pieces stayed whole.  ”Tall!” she shouted.

Little Man enjoyed listening to the ‘snap’ the spaghetti made when he broke into pieces, then he pushed it into his playdough like his sister.  

He also enjoyed shaking his pasta in the little dish, shouting “rattle, rattle!”.  He then decided to drop the pieces on the floor one by one, which was fine – all part of the learning process, because he was listening to the sound they made as they dropped.  But he also learnt that if you drop things on the floor, you have to pick them up again afterwards…

This is a great activity for developing fine motor skills and hand strength, which are so important when it comes to writing later on.

I’m linking up with