Letter learning with Playdough

Arts and crafts are a great way to make learning fun.  My pre-schooler is very keen on learning
letters at the moment, so I’m busy coming up with ideas on how to build this
into our daily activities.  He is a
massive fan of play dough so I thought it would be great to combine these two
activities to make learning letters even more fun for him.  My 6 year old has also started to bring home
spelling lists from school as part of his homework, so this gave me a great
idea on how we could make this into activity all of my children could enjoy
together.

We got out the play dough, rolling pins and letter cutters
and set to work.  First job was for my
pre-schooler to find the cutters for the letters he had been learning in
playschool.  This was a great way to see what
letters he could already recognise.  He
then set on rolling and cutting these letters out.  My 6 year took his school spelling list out
of his bag. I read them out to him and he then cut the words out of play dough
for me to check. My 2 year old is a play dough learner, so she was just happy
to bash the play dough with the rolling pin and experiment with squashing the
letters cutters into the dough.  We
finished off the activity with the boys finding and cutting out the letters for
their own names and helping their little sister to make hers.

Inevitably there were a few squabbles to referee when the
boys wanted to use the same letter cutters at the same time and some of the
play dough my toddler was using ended up on the floor, but overall it was a
worthwhile and enjoyable activity.

This activity could be repeated with number cutters. Toddlers
and pre-schoolers could focus on learning to recognise each number and school
infants could cut out numbers for you to make into sums for them to solve.