Unlocking Creativity: The Benefits of Open-Ended Play and Fun Play Dough Activities for Your Little Ones

As parents, we all want the best for our children, especially when it comes to their development and creativity. One powerful way to foster these qualities is through open-ended play. This type of play allows children to explore, experiment, and express themselves in ways that structured activities simply cannot. 

What is Open-Ended Play?

Open-ended play refers to activities that have no specific goal or predetermined outcome. This type of play encourages children to use their imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Instead of following strict rules, kids are free to create their own narratives and explore their ideas. Whether they are building, role-playing, or experimenting, open-ended play allows for endless possibilities. 

Benefits of Open-Ended Play

  1. Fosters Creativity: Children learn to think outside the box and develop their unique ideas, enhancing their creative thinking skills.
  2. Encourages Critical Thinking: As kids make decisions and solve problems during play, they strengthen their cognitive skills and gain confidence in their abilities.
  3. Builds Social Skills: When children engage in open-ended play with peers or siblings, they learn to communicate, collaborate, and negotiate, which are vital skills for social interaction.
  4. Supports Emotional Development: This type of play allows children to express their feelings and work through emotions in a safe environment.
  5. Enhances Fine Motor Skills: Manipulating materials in open-ended play, like play dough, strengthens hand muscles and improves coordination.

Fun Play Dough Activities for Open-Ended Play

Play dough is a versatile and engaging material that lends itself perfectly to open-ended play. Here are some creative activities you can do at home with your little ones:

  1. Nature Exploration

Take a walk outside and collect leaves, twigs, and small stones. When you return home, encourage your child to use the play dough to create their own natural scene. They can make trees, flowers, or even animals, combining their findings with their imagination! 

  1. Storytelling Sculptures

Invite your child to create characters or settings from their favorite story using play dough. Once they’ve made their figures, encourage them to tell the story using their creations. This not only nurtures creativity but also enhances their storytelling skills.

  1. Sensory Play with Textures

Mix different textures into your play dough experience! Add sand, rice, or fabric scraps to the dough. As your child plays, discuss how the textures feel and how they can be used in their creations. This activity stimulates their senses while promoting creativity. 

  1. Play Dough Café

Set up a pretend café where your child can create their own play dough dishes. They can make pizzas, cakes, or anything their imagination desires. Use cookie cutters and tools to shape the food, and encourage role-play by pretending to serve customers! 

  1. Imaginative Building

Challenge your child to build a structure, whether it’s a castle, a bridge, or a spaceship, using only play dough. This activity encourages spatial awareness and critical thinking as they figure out how to support their creations. 

  1. Emotion Faces

Use play dough to make different facial expressions. Ask your child to create faces that represent various emotions—happy, sad, angry, surprised. Discuss these emotions and how they might feel in different situations, fostering emotional intelligence.

Final Thoughts

Open-ended play, especially through materials like play dough, offers your child invaluable opportunities for growth and exploration. By incorporating these activities into your routine, you’ll not only engage your little ones but also help them develop crucial skills that will serve them well in the future. So roll out that play dough, and watch as your child’s creativity flourishes!

Happy playing!

All images lovingly captured by @natasha.murnane

 

Let’s learn through play – fine motor skills edition

Looking for some fun activities to do with your little ones this week that are not only fun but actually have a huge developmental impact too?

Well we have some amazing activities in store for you, they are created by an Occupational Therapist and Early Years/Foundation Phase Teacher Bellala and have been put in practice in their therapy and classrooms as well as in our homes, the little ones just love them!

The idea of this blog post is to help you provide the child with verbal and visual cues to assist with ideation.  Ideation forms part of the planning process and this is important as it is the first step of coming up with a plan.  By asking certain questions or by placing equipment strategically, this can assist the child to further their plans independently.  If you find that the child struggles with following an instruction, guide them by providing the first step in the process only to determine whether they can continue planning independently. If the instructions are too easy for the child to do, add additional instructions which will make the activity more of a challenge.  

For all of these tasks you will need the following items to start:
– a Dough Animal play kit (if you don’t have a play kit you can also just use a pot of play dough)
– small items from around the house/garden – don’t worry you’ll be collecting these within the activity.

This week’s activities have a focus on fine motor skills, the tactile system, bilateral coordination, letter formation and spatial skills.

1. Hide & Seek

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You can start this activity off by doing a little treasure hunt either outside in the garden, around the house, in the toy box or you can pre select a number of small objects for this task. Keep these objects small, giving the child this extra task of size is great for spatial skills awareness.

The idea is to hide objects in the play dough and ask the child to find them using only their sense of touch, working on their tactile system.

If you have number of different objects, you can add another task on top of this by having them close their eyes when feeling for the objects and to guess which object they are holding, before opening their eyes to see if they are correct.

It’s so much fun that you’ll be covering and uncovering objects all day.

2. Learning About Pressure

 

For this activity you’ll need one of our cookie cutters. Our cookie cutters are not only great for play dough fun but you can also use them for creating shapes in other craft projects, and even for baking biscuits.

So you’ll ask the child to take the cutter and press it down using two hands. They’ll practice pressing down hard and pressing softly with the cutter and then you’ll discuss what happens with light versus hard pressure.

Does light pressure cut right through the play dough?

Does hard pressure make a new shape in the play dough?

If you don’t have a cookie cutter, you can also use your dough pot or lid with the hollow side facing down.

3. Fun Way to Spell

 

Find a small object with a blunt point for this next one. Our favourite is a stick from the garden or some small stones.

Use the small object to indent on the play dough to practice the alphabet from A-Z. You can do this by placing small objects like stones in the letter formation or by using a sharper object like a stick to indent in thee play dough. Practice saying the letters out loud as you do this activity.

You can then move on to spelling out their name, you can help by doing your own play dough indentation or by writing with a marker on paper.

 

4. Memory Game


If you kept your small objects from the first activity, you can use them for this activity, if not, then it’s time for another fun treasure hunt, yay!

Place all the treasures including favourite small toys into your Dough Animal bag or a pillow slip if you don’t have a bag. Make sure your little one knows what they are putting in the bag, you can have a conversation about each object, how it smells, looks, what it feels like and what it does. 

Then, ask the child to find an item in the bag by only feeling with their hand.  This is a great activity for memory as well as tactile development.

5. Time for a Puzzle

We all love puzzles, so we’ve created a fun puzzle activity using your Childs favourite cookie cutter shape or you can use a cup/bowl to create the shape if you don’t have any cutters.

Press the cutter into the play dough to create the shape. Then ask the child to cut up the shape into 4 parts using a blunt bread knife or a dough cutter. 

Then you need to change the order of the pieces and ask the child to put the pieces back together like a puzzle.  

 

That's it! Loads of fun while learning through play.


And remember, that each of these activities, although they may seem simple, they are extremely stimulating and can take a lot of focus and attention for a little one to achieve.

You don’t need to do them all in one sitting but rather space them out over the week for 5 days of fun.

If you feel your little one needs a break, have them just play with the dough and objects in front of them without instruction, or they can create their own game.

The key to learning is play!

Make sure to check back for more activities, or sign up to our newsletter!

Let’s make some homemade stampers using simple kitchen pantry materials

Skills learned:
Sensory play, Fine motor skills, Creativity, Concentration

As we are still pretty much in lockdown and many kids are still at home, you may be the kind of parent that gave up on home schooling a long time ago already and letting the kids learn through playing and learning as they go, or you may be absolutely loving being teacher at the moment and have a weeks worth of activities planned every Sunday.

Well no matter which parent you are, you’ll love this easy and fun activity using only kitchen pantry items – your kids fav Mac and Cheese pasta and clean ice lolly sticks from the recent heatwave, oh and of course some play dough but if you don’t already have you can get some here.

What you'll need

Dry macaroni or any dry pasta

Ice lolly sticks

Hot glue gun

Play dough

Steps

 

Start by heating up your glue gun (this one is for the parents as it can get really hot!)

Place some glue dots on the ice lolly sticks and ask your little ones to place the macaroni or pasta onto the glue dots, be quick as the glue dries fast!

Get creative with the placement as these will make lovely imprints in your play dough.

Start stamping! Creating patterns in the dough with home made stampers is very exciting for little ones and teaches them some excellent skills such as imprinting, cause and effect and patterns and texture.

We’d love to see your creations, tag us on Instagram @doughanimal