Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Play Dough & Loose Parts Ocean

Do you ever wonder how you can spark your kids creativity? Do you ever look for opportunities to introduce loose parts? Well here's a great idea for your toddler or preschooler to do just those things! 

This, like most other great ideas, was inspired by/brought on by my daughter herself. She grabbed her blue cut up straws and I asked if she wanted to use them with play dough and she said yes. So, we set that up. Then, since our play dough was blue I decided we could take it a step further by turning on the sounds of the ocean on our sound machine and adding a few more loose parts. You too can inspire your child to create an ocean with their play dough and loose parts without having a sound machine. I'm sure you could find some good sounds of the ocean on Youtube. Incorporating the sounds was so great!


The other things I added were two colors of green cut up straws, in addition to the blue. I put them in a little plastic bowl that had flip flops on it because I thought that was fitting for the ocean scene. I also gave her clear glass accent gems. You can find these at Dollar Tree or Michael's. She was thrilled by those and decided she wanted a gem filled ocean. This made for a really great sensory/tactile experience when she was done we rubbed our hands over the play dough with all the gems in it.

I also gave her the little sharks and whales from her Animal Planet tube. She decided against using them though. She used a few of the cut up straws. We talked about how the blue ones could be waves, and then she all on her own decided to add some green ones for seaweed. What a little genius! 

The rolling pin was out from the initial smoothing out of the dough.

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