Your Child Can Learn While Having Fun With Play Dough

Whether you make it at home or buy from a store, your child is sure to have fun with play dough. While playing with the dough, your child can learn and develop skills that will help them for life. Here are some benefits of playing with play dough: 

A creative mind

While having great fun with the squishy dough, kids also learn to be imaginative. “When playing with play dough, children are beginning to use symbolic thinking, or pretending the play dough is something else. This is an important skill for cognitive flexibility, and a way in which children express their ideas,” says Michigan State University Extension. From making simple familiar items with the dough that they come across every day, kids usually move to more complex ones as they grow. 

A sense of achievement

As kids play and create newer things with play dough, they are bound to feel more confident about their own creations and have a sense of accomplishment when praised for the same. “Pounding, flattening, and squeezing are healthy and safe outlets for extra energy. They can also help children cope with strong feelings,” says the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a non-profit headquartered in Washington D.C. 

Motor skills’ development

As children roll, pound, squeeze and stretch the dough, they are using their hands and fingers and strengthening their muscles. By getting a feel and grip of things, they are, in a playful way, learning to take on other important tasks like holding a pencil, eraser, scissors etc. in the near future. The activity involves a lot of hand-eye coordination as well.

When they measure and mix the dough and experiment with several shapes and sizes (big or small, round or triangle), they also learn some early concepts of maths and science.