Rainbow Play Dough Kit
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One of my favorite ways to incorporate holidays or seasonal changes into our classroom is by making a new classroom play dough kit! Today’s Rainbow Play Dough Kit could be introduced as a fun St. Patrick’s Day sensory activity. It’s perfect for spring and will provide tons of hands-on learning fun!
*Pair with our St. Patrick’s Day Centers and Activities for Pre-K & Kindergarten!
Rainbow Play Dough Kit
For this seasonal play dough sensory activity, we used our Ikea sectioned container. It’s really much bigger than it looks – almost a foot wide! It’s perfect for holding enough play dough and manipulatives for a large group, while also keeping everything orderly.
The play dough stays really fresh in the box and the little sections are self-correcting for independent clean up!
Materials for the Rainbow Play Dough Kit
Below are the materials that we used for our play dough kit but feel free to use whatever fun supplies you have on hand!
- Blue play dough
- Red play dough
- Yellow play dough
- 12 pipe cleaners (6 colors) cut in half
- Handful of pony beads in rainbow colors (240 beads – 40 of all 6 colors)
- Shamrock glitter (optional)
- Handful of pom poms in rainbow colors (36 – 6 of all 6 colors)
The dyed barley used in our Valentine’s Day Play Dough kit would work nicely for this (being rainbow-colored, and an essential grain in Ireland) but I had just used it the month before and wanted to change things up.
I had my daughter help me make our homemade play dough for this classroom play dough kit.
Add in whatever mix-ins and manipulatives you have on hand or can use for other activities. I try to include materials that I think the children can get a few different uses out of, and I try to offer different materials between the kits.
Ways to Play
By providing different types of play dough and different manipulatives, children can find so many different ways to play. I’ll list a few of the ways we engaged with our Rainbow Play Dough Kit, but your group will probably come up with completely different ways to play!
- We experimented with color mixing to make the secondary colors of the rainbow
- Rolled our own rainbow (like we did when we made rainbow slime)
- Pressed the beads into the matching play dough colors
- Made patterns with the colored beads
- Counted the beads
- Used our fine motor skills to thread the beads onto the pipe cleaners in a rainbow pattern
- Made rainbows with the pipe cleaners, bridging them between two mounds of play dough
- Pushed the pom poms into the play dough
What would you add or substitute in your own rainbow play dough kit? I’d love to know!
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Where do you get your plastics storage boxes
Tatia,
I often find containers like this one at my local dollar store. I also have used plastic tackle boxes from Amazon. Hope this helps! 🙂