Fun Friday: Homemade Playdough

Program Idea:

Our Fun Friday program has been running for the past two years, and I’m beginning to find it difficult to decide on themes or ideas to explore.  The wide age-range of the kids (grades 1 – 4) sometimes makes it difficult to plan programs, plus its only 45 minutes long which means that we need to finish things up fairly quickly.

This month we’re going to make play dough.  I was beginning my planning for this shortly after my Petite Picasso program in January and must of had arts and crafts on the brain.  I decided on play dough because many kids seem to like the hands-on activities and it’s an avenue to be creative and imaginative.

I found a recipe that does not require heating the ingredients (and since I didn’t test it, I’m hoping it works!) so after putting all the dry ingredients in the mixing bowls, I’m going to let the kids add the water and mix it together.  Then offer plenty of playtime.  I grabbed some of our clay art books for the kids to look at and brought a ton of cookie cutters from home to play with.  I’ll let you know how it goes after our program….

Reaction:

Our program is over and the kids LOVED it!  It’s amazing that so many of these kids don’t get to play with play dough and other activities like this at home because they’re “too messy!”  The kids, like I said, got to mix the play dough together in groups.  We did four groups with five kids each and they did fairly well sharing and taking turns stirring the play dough.  Then I let them loose for about 20 minutes to create whatever they wanted.  A few kids were very worried about their hands being messy, but I assured everyone we would clean up at the end.  Many of the children took home their creations to dry out or to play with some more.  Overall, we had a lot of fun and the kids really enjoyed themselves!