4th of July Play Dough Kit

We are having so much fun with our 12 Months of Play Dough Kits series, sharing a new themed play dough kit for every month of the year! And what would be better than a 4th of July Play Dough Kit to kick off July?

For non-American readers, we do have our Summer Play Dough kit, or you could take the idea of this kit and make a similar play dough kit for your country.

While this play dough kit has a definite U.S.A. theme to grown-ups, children are more likely to see other potentials in the materials and will still bring their own creative interpretation to them. This could easily be a Snow White kit, a county fair kit, a pie making kit, or even a Cat in the Hat kit. The possibilities are endless.

Making a 4th of July Play Dough Kit

First, gather your materials:

• One batch natural playdough
• One batch blue play dough
• Red Play Doh (2 cans)
• Red, white and blue gems
• Star cookie cutters
• American Flag toothpicks
• Clear stones with letters written on them (kind of a DIY Moveable Alphabet)

I used commercial red play dough for this kit because I just could not get that pure red colour. Every red play dough recipe I tried turned into another variation of pink – some darker than others, but not the true red I was looking for.

Use what you can find and look to what I included as inspiration and suggestion.

My daughter got to play with this kit before I showed it to my daycare children, and the first thing she wanted to do was build a flag!

She used her creative problem solving skills to manipulate the play dough and slowly build her flag, using one of the toothpick flags as a guide.

Pushing the gems into the dough is a great fine motor strength builder, and it isolates the fingers as well.

The cookie cutters are also great for building fine motor strength and also encouraging children to be careful and precise in their work.

Here are a few of the ways they played:

• Patterning: with the gems, the stars cut from the cookie cutters, etc.
• Building star towers
• Spelling words with the letters
• Rolling the dough into different shapes with their hands
• Comparing the homemade dough and Play Doh (texture)
• Trying to build other flags (with a Flag Sticker book from the bookshelf)
• Playing bake shop (cherry and blueberry pies)
• Making bracelets by wrapping play dough around their wrists and adorning with gems

If you have access to a laminated map, having the children try to form the play dough into the boundaries would be a great way to learn about the different states and their relations to each other.

Every time we make one of these classroom play dough kits, I am blown away by how creative the kids are and how they are able to come up with ways to play with the kit that I wouldn’t have ever thought of!

What types of activities will you be doing to celebrate and teach about 4th of July?

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