BENEFITS OF PLAYING WITH PLAYDOUGH

Benefits of playing with playdough

Dear parents,

We at Ukiyo preschool miss our students so much at this social distancing time. The best thing right now we could do is to accompany and support you to play with your children at home so they could keep their development progress and reduce stress from being at home.

Today, we will introduce playdough. Children love playing with dough, It encourages their development in fine motor skills, concentration, creativity, relaxing, and offers opportunities to practice language and social skills.

1. Build up manipulative/motor skills

By modeling and shaping things with their hands and fingers and molding playdough into different shapes, they are actually building up strength in their tiny hands. The acts of squishing, rolling, flattening, etc.. help your children develop muscles used in their hands for fine motor movements which will be useful in the future like holding a pencil or using scissors.

2. Calming them

Much like the squishy stress ball, you pull out from time to time, squeezing playdough is great for helping calm down your kids. Playing with playdough can help ease tension, release excess energy, improve focus, and express emotions. If your child is feeling stressed, sit them down with a container of playdough and watch their worries fade away.

3. Encourage creativity

No matter how many colors you have, there is an unlimited number of creations your kids can make from play dough. Creating objects from scratch encourages your kids to expand their imaginations and think in new and innovative ways.

4. Enhance hands-eyes coordination

While playing dough, you probably picked up different materials and tools, such as rolling pins and cookie cutters, spoon, fork. These tools, which come in a variety of sizes, shapes will develop your child's hand-eye coordination by forcing them to manipulate the materials to fit their ideas.

5. Improve social skills

While sharing various colors, tools, and materials, as well as spending ample time together discussing and collaborating, your children will experience great practice with their social skills. Ask your children to describe their process while they play to help them engage with others.

6. Support literacy and numeracy

It's difficult to get kids interested in learning, especially about tricky subjects like reading or math. Playdough is an awesome tool for teaching your children about counting, shapes, geometry, descriptions, and more. Playing with playdough increases their vocabulary by using words that describe manipulation such as: push, pull, squeeze, bend, twist, roll, stretch, squash, pinch, flatten, poke, create objects, shapes, etc. while doing them. Children will start to understand basic maths concepts -longer than / shorter than/ the same length as/ bigger than/ smaller than / less than/ more than.

7. Promote playtime

In today's technology-driven world, kids are constantly drawn into technology equipments. Instead of letting your kids sit in front of the TV all day, give them play dough and encourage time spent disconnected. Playdough helps kids slow down and focus on playing while using a number of senses and skills in the process.

8. Way to express themselves, develop the senses, develop aesthetic awareness

Children show their understanding of the objects by modelling them. Through these products, the parents can better understand their children. Besides, playing with dough helps children develop their senses especially visual and tactile. Children can learn about mixing colour, composition, structure of the objects and arrange the parts so that harmonious in color and well-proportioned in composition so their aesthetic awareness develops.

Preschoolers can help to make the dough material if it was an uncooked recipe and there is another recipe for smaller children.

Stay tuned for our next post, Ukiyo preschool will recommend our own recipes and activities that are suitable for your children.