Addition with Play Dough Food

We did several hands-on addition activities around here over the last two months or so. Check out Play Dough Addition, Owl Addition 1-10, Preschool Addition Game with Chicks and Eggs, and don’t forget about this fabulous guest post: Animal Math Worksheets (1-10)!

The first play dough addition activity we did used manipulatives to visualize the numbers E wanted to add. For this Addition with Play Dough Food activity, E used her recently found skills at using play dough molds and added strawberries and cherries 🙂

(E was 4 years and 4 months old.)

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Materials for Addition with Play Dough Food

• Play dough. {Homemade or store-bought; different colors optional, but E really enjoyed making the stems a different color 🙂 }
• Play dough food molds.
• Number cookie cutters.

E has been using her screen time to watch toy shows on Youtube. She has so much fun watching them, and even started acting them out at home 🙂

You may be thinking that those shows don’t seem very educational – but E has not only learned how to use play dough molds {and frankly, until I watched one of the shows over her shoulder, I had quite a bit of trouble with those molds myself!}, she’s also found lots of inspiration for new things to try.

So we now have play dough fruit with stems in different colors 🙂

To practice addition with play dough food, E cut numbers, a plus and an equals sign from play dough and made strawberries and cherries she could count to solve the equation.

When she’d found the solution, she proudly cut the correct number from play dough to complete the equation.

I love how much E learns about these academic topics with hands-on sensory activities!

Have you used play dough to practice addition facts? Leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you!

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