Valentine’s Day Play Dough Kit

This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. View our full disclosure policy here.

141 Shares

Homemade play dough is a staple in my home and preschool program. It is one of our favorite learning materials and we are constantly coming up with new ways to play and learn with it. Today, I wanted to share our classroom-sized Valentine’s Day Play Dough Kit! This kit pairs perfectly with the rest of our Valentine-themed crafts and learning activities we do during the month of February!

*Pair with our Valentine’s Day Centers and Activities for Pre-K & Kindergarten!

This Valentine's Day play dough kit is perfect for the month of February and so fun for use in the classroom or at home!

Valentine’s Day Play Dough Kit

This play dough container is quite big – almost a foot wide! That means it can hold enough materials for several children to play with at once while also being compact and orderly.

I love that the children can feel empowered to put their materials away when they are done and that the sectioned container “presents” the materials similar to using a sectioned tray, without me having to set it up and put it away each time.

Add in whatever supplies you have on hand like sprinkles, cookie cutters, and gems to make this play dough kit your own.

Materials in our Valentine’s Play Dough Kit:

You can use my recipes for homemade play doughs, or you can simply add some scent to commercial dough. Whatever works better for you!

To begin, I made the vanilla play dough and then kneaded in the gel colors afterwards, but that is definitely the harder way to go about things. I just didn’t want to make 4 different batches. I also like the marbled effect that results from not completely kneading the color all of the way through.

Add in whatever mix-ins and manipulatives you have on hand or can use for other activities. We’re going to use those gems and ladybugs for counting. The artificial roses will likely be used for a process painting activity later. The dyed barley was leftover from our ice cream play dough invitation and we like to use it as “sprinkles.”

In our play dough kit we included colored barley as sprinkles.

How 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 Valentine’s Day Play Dough Kit, but your group will probably come up with completely different ways to play and that’s great!

We counted ladybugs and added them to cupcake liners.

Here are some of our favorite ways to play:

  • Exercising our fine motor skills by using our pincer grip to pick up and delicately arrange the heart gems and ladybugs.
  • Counting out the ladybugs as we divided them into several individual cupcake liners.
  • Using our hand strength to flatten out the play dough without the use of rollers, and practicing our dexterity in rolling the dough into “rolls” and “balls.”
  • Identifying different shapes using our cookie cutters and problem solving how to ensure we had enough dough to get the full shape.
  • “Planting” the roses and discussing what types of things flowers might need.
The kids loved using their hand strength to flatten out the play dough without the use of rollers.

Would your group enjoy playing with this play dough kit? What would you add or substitute in this classroom play dough kit?

The sections in the container make this play dough kit easy to organize.

Want unlimited access to even MORE of our activities and resources? Join us in the Print and Play Club!

Your planning will be so much easier with instant access to:

  • hundreds of printables
  • every TKC resource
  • video lessons
  • a digital games vault
  • Pre-K and TK Scope & Sequence
  • a PLAYlist of fun songs AND activities
  • professional development
  • additional teacher resources…
Want unlimited access to tons of activities and resources for Pre-K, TK, and Kindergarten? Join us in the Print and Play Club!

Be sure to request an invitation so that you don’t miss your chance to be part of the best early childhood club around!

Jennifer
Latest posts by Jennifer (see all)
141 Shares

4 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *