Playdough Rolling Pins Textured and Dough Tools and Cutters, Wooden Roller, Clay, Children Craft Play, School Toddler, Play Dough Plastic Shapes with Patterned Rollers

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If you have a few kiddos who seem to struggle with creativity, or imaginative play while at the play dough table, The OT Toolbox has you covered with these great play dough mats to facilitate engagement and boost creativity for kids. Simple play dough recipe- This play dough recipe without cream of tarter is probably the simplest version which still challenges life skills. Our Wooden Play Dough Set is crafted from sustainable and eco-friendly beechwood, making it a perfect choice for both home and nursery use. Play dough helps build multiple fine motor skills, while promoting play, as it instantly provides multi-sensory hands-on interaction. Children who are tactile seekers love to engage with play dough, and instantly begin squishing, squeezing, and molding it.

Use a kit, tray, or a few cookie cutters, and you’ve got an instant engagement tool that allows for conversation and creation, while building that important therapeutic relationship. Interacting with play dough provides social emotional learning and social skill development opportunities between children in a small group or child and adult. Play dough recipes can be adapted from a very simple dough recipe to add in different ingredients and materials to create recipes on a spectrum of abilities and cooking tasks. When using play dough with no right or wrong way to play, play it is the perfect tool for social interaction without competition. Learning toolWhen using play dough as a tool, children participate together by talking, sharing, and co-building. Play dough is a tactile gem, and occupational therapy practitioners know this! There are so many benefits of play dough. Playing with this dough regularly is great, as it is a toy with no right or wrong way to play, is safe, and appeals to many people with various learning styles and needs. Children can make their own play dough making it even more fun! This is especially beneficial for kids who struggle with letter formation, and have weak fine motor skills. You can use play dough as part of a literacy routine, by creating scenes, acting out stories, stamping out sight words, representing new vocabulary terms, or using push pins to form words. Rapport building tool Play dough manipulation also provides tactile sensory awareness and proprioceptive input, which can serve to be therapeutic by giving deep pressure to the hands, fingers, and arms in a calming manner.

Add different textures such as salt, glitter, beads, rice, to add more tactile input for your sensory seeker.Use playdough as a creative way to practice math skills and concepts, or use it to mold and shape letters to work on handwriting.

One of the many benefits of play dough, is learning. It can be a multi-level teaching tool for areas including math, literacy, and handwriting. Learners of all ages and stages can reap the benefits of play dough. As an adult, don’t you still enjoy the squishing, squeezing, and molding fun using play dough? There are many cool play dough tray ideas and inspiration for other themed activities that will make your play dough table the coolest table in the school building. We’ll cover how to use play dough as a tool to support development in all of these areas in greater detail below.Play dough can be used for gross motor development also. Include playdough in an obstacle course as a stop between obstacles, or gross motor exercises. As an added benefit, playdough mats support emotional regulation. These emotions playdough mats can be used in combination with other self regulation strategies to offer heavy work through the hands while building emotional intelligence in kids. Boosts creativity and imagination

There are many commercially available play dough tools, but there are also tools that can be found in the home! Kitchen tools safe for children to use, are some of the best tools for bilateral hand skills. Start with simple flatware such as butter knives, forks, and spoons. Next, look through your utensil drawers. So, when you pop open a tub of colorful play dough, you probably aren’t thinking about the benefits of playing with playdough…but your pediatric occupational therapist probably is! Fine motor skill development Another idea is to use play dough ropes to form letters and pre-writing lines and shapes with play dough. Add gloves for play with the learner with extreme avoidance, until they can tolerate touching the play dough.If you want a fun way to encourage play dough engagement, it can be fun to add a weekly or monthly theme to therapy sessions way to facilitate hand actions, for play dough manipulation, including tool use.Just use play dough in each session and switch out the manipulatives, cookie cutters, or items to hide in the play dough. Play dough can be used as a relaxing medium that provides calm and quiet time for children who are feeling anxious or stressed and need a break away from the noise and the action. Using play dough can be great for the sensory seeker who loves texture. Those who seek out heavy work through the hands can benefit from Play dough can target many areas of skill development. Tons of inspirational ideas can be found online. There are many creative individuals online who share awesome ideas for play dough fun. As therapists, you can take those fun ideas and add your Occupational Therapy (OT) eye to build the skills a child needs for their specific development. Rolling a play dough snake is particularly effective for developing bilateral coordination skills. In many functional tasks, both hands do symmetrical task (buttoning a shirt, pulling up pants, jumping rope, etc. When rolling a lump of play dough with the hands together, one needs to use the same amount of pressure or force with both hands, and move the playdough together at the same time. Otherwise, the play dough snake is lopsided, or thin on one end and not the other.