Invitation to Create Play Dough Pancakes

We’ve finally made it official: My blogging buddies and I are doing themed posts to go with a great book once a month now!  This month’s theme is play dough!

For this theme, I picked one of my daughter’s favorite books for inspiration: If You Give a Pig a Pancake. It’s just so much fun to follow along with the little pig’s requests and the chaos that ensues!

We focused on the title activity and I set up an Invitation to Create Play Dough Pancakes.

(E was 4 years and 10 months old.)

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Materials for Invitation to Create Play Dough Pancakes

• Play dough. {Homemade or store-bought in color(s) of your choice. I raided our homemade play dough stash for different colors with no regard for realism. If you’d prefer something more “pancake-y”, you could make plain homemade play dough without adding any color. Check out my Magic Play Dough Halloween Treat Bags post for an idea of what plain play dough looks like.}
• Tiny plates (optional).
• Pig (optional). {E picked the pig from N’s Little People Pig Pen and Pond set.}
• Cornstarch, water, and real syrup to make pretend syrup (optional).
• Divided tray (optional).
• Play dough tools (optional).

You could definitely make it a perfectly fine activity with just play dough! The rest is just for added fun and different ways to play.

I made a little bit of pretend syrup by mixing cornstarch with a little water and some real syrup. I was concerned that real syrup alone would be too sticky and ended up with a pretty fun consistency. It even smelled like syrup! E asked if she could taste it, but when I said I didn’t think it would taste good, she decided to skip it. It wouldn’t have hurt her at all, though!

After I’d set everything up for her,

we read the book. And we sang the song that goes with it, of course! The songs are an integral part of E’s enjoyment of this series 🙂

Related: More play dough activities. | More literacy activities.

After that, E got to work on the pancakes. She had a bit of a different idea about pancakes than I did, but that’s just fine.

This glittery greenish pancake was the first one she worked on and the one she played with the longest.

She loved pouring the syrup and was very careful with it.

When she ended up with just a little too much syrup, she asked for a paper towel to clean it up.

Finally, she served it to me “with a crushed candy cane on top” 🙂

For the next pancake, she used the technique I’d envisioned and flattened the ball of play dough with her palm.

It really looked like a pancake, but E didn’t seem to enjoy that fact and cut it up instead 😉 Again, she added a layer of syrup on top.

When E had had enough of pancakes, she decided that it was the pig’s birthday and that she had to decorate it with play dough.

She very carefully and deliberately rolled out bits of play dough and cut them into squares before putting them on the pig.

Once she had covered the entire pig, she proceeded to take the play dough off again.

I had to go take care of N for a little bit, and when I returned, I found an actual stack of play dough pancakes on one of the tiny plates and E was getting ready to pour some syrup over them. I got the pour shot 🙂

This activity was great fun! I expected the play dough to get ruined with the syrup, but we actually just kneaded it into the play dough and were able to save almost all of it.

{Just because I was tempted to write cupcakes instead of pancakes in almost all instances above, here’s a link to my actual play dough cupcakes post 😉 }

Have you read the book If You Give a Pig a Pancake? Have you made pancakes from play dough? Leave a comment below!

And now go check out what my blogger friends have written about this month!

Cars & Vehicles: Play Dough City {Free Printables} by The Natural Homeschool

Playdough Crafts and Book Activities by Sight and Sound Reading

Seasons of a Tree Play Dough Mat {Free Printable} from School Time Snippets

Robert Munsch’s Pigs Play Dough Mats by Living Life and Learning

Fish Playdough Mat – Perfect for The Rainbow Fish by Itsy Bitsy Fun

Camilla the Cupcake Fairy: Pretty Playdough Cupcakes by Artsy Momma

The Find It Book by The Life of Jennifer Dawn

Previous themes were shark posts and back-to-school posts.

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