Exploring Numbers with Play Dough

 

The other day, E and I made a fresh new badge of homemade play dough. Before we were able to use it, E’s baby brother N needed us, though, and bed time came without having had a chance to play with our play dough. As a surprise, I set up a divided tray with cookie cutters, number stamps, counters and a die as an invitation to explore numbers with play dough the next day after preschool.

 

(E was 3.75 years old.)

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To explore numbers with play dough, you’ll need:

• Play dough {we made ours following our favorite recipe from Learn with Play at Home but store bought play dough works just as well}.
• Number cookie cutters.
• Number stamps {they’re meant to be cutters according to Hasbro but I thought they were stamps when I saw them, and we found them pretty difficult to cut with, much easier to stamp…}; if you’re looking to buy them, there’s also this set that may be a nice alternative, even though I haven’t seen it in person: it includes letters and is actually cheaper.
• Magnetic numbers.
• Counters – we had blue glass gems and colorful party picks.
• Die.
• Divided tray.

 

 

 

 

E started out decorating the play dough right where it was in the middle of the tray.

 

 

She was losing interest pretty quickly, so I encouraged her to take out the play dough and try the little “game” I’d thought of in case she didn’t really know what to do with the materials: Roll the die and decorate the play dough with the number you rolled. So use the magnetic number 6, number 6 stamp, number 6 cookie cutter, six glass gems and six party picks.

She did it once {there are six gems, she pushed the sixth one way into the play dough 😉 }

 

 

then decided to proceed without the die and pick a number herself. She went with number 2.

 

 

This seemed to remind her how much she likes cookie cutters, and she started cutting 2s.

 

 

Lots of 2s 🙂 And apparently, they spelled my name 😉

 

 

Next, she moved on to number 1

 

 

and as you may imagine, the 1s spelled Papa’s name 🙂

 

 

After the cookie cutters, she moved on to the number stamps. They were new to us, and I found them pretty interesting. Now E was getting interested as well.

She tried to use them for cutting but wasn’t really happy with the results

 

 

{As it turns out, Hasbro does call them cutters… You’d have to roll out the play dough pretty thin to make good cut outs. If you want to cut, it’s way easier with cookie cutters.}

It didn’t take her long to figure out how much pressure to use to just make indentations in the play dough, and she liked it a lot better that way.

 

 

E ended up exploring her numbers for about 45 minutes and had a lot of fun.

Then it was time for clean up. She insisted on tossing the stamps back into the tray – she had surprisingly good aim 😉

 

 

Does your toddler or preschooler enjoy learning her numbers? What’s her favorite way of learning? Tell me about it in the comments!

 

 

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