Plant a Christmas Tree Play Dough Fine Motor Activity

4-year-old N has been pulling out the play dough on a daily basis lately, and I’d like to share a quick and simple early Christmas idea we had the other day: Plant a Christmas Tree Play Dough Fine Motor Activity!

(N was 4 years and 4 months old.)

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Materials for Plant a Christmas Tree Play Dough Fine Motor Activity

• Play dough (any type will do, homemade, storebought, whatever you have on hand).
• Wooden, plastic, or metal mini Christmas trees. You could also print and laminate some pictures of Christmas trees if you don’t have anything else on hand. {Maybe these would work? }
• Something to dig a hole in the play dough with. We had the drill from this set {although it looks like they discontinued the version with the yellow drill and changed it to a blue one} that’s always a hit, and I also offered a small plastic knife from a doll tea set. But a finger will work fine, too 😉
• Cookie sheet or something similar to play on. Optional but I like to contain our activities to a certain area, and a cookie sheet works great for that.

To prepare the activity, I smooshed and smoothed out a chunk of green play dough on the cookie sheet for N while he opened up the bag of cute little Christmas trees (great fine motor activity right there 😉 ). That’s all it took – so easy!

We talked about how he could plant the Christmas trees. N decided to “dig” some holes with the drill tool. Both of my kids love that drill so much – easily the best part of the play-doh dentist set. In fact, it’s the only part of the set we still use.

We threw in some counting practice – turns out we had eight mini Christmas trees.

I suggested he could drill all eight holes before starting to plant the Christmas trees but N wasn’t into the idea and decided to start planting with only four holes.

The idea worked so well <3

Once N had made the remaining four holes and planted all eight Christmas trees, he decided to count them again. Gotta make sure he didn’t lose any of them!

Nope, they were all accounted for 🙂

N ended up pulling out the Christmas trees and replanting them several times.

And then he realized that the spots where he had pulled out the Christmas trees looked kind of like animal tracks. He kept asking “What could have made those tracks?”. We talked about it for a while, but he didn’t like any of the answers I came up with 😉

We ended up turning the animal tracks idea into a new activity – that post is coming up soon 🙂 {Sign up to my twice-weekly newsletter if you want to be notified when it’s time.}

 

 

Here are some more awesome Christmas tree-related activities for you:

Let’s Decorate the Christmas Tree Mini Folding Coloring Book

Christmas Countdown Day 17: Christmas Tree Shape Cards

Christmas Tree Felt Set

Marbled Christmas Trees

Christmas Tree Matching Activity for Preschoolers by Life Over Cs

Button Christmas Tree Ornament Craft by Hands On As We Grow

Christmas Tree Sensory Bag by Fun Learning for Kids

Christmas Tree Alphabet Case Match by Fun Learning Ideas