Thanksgiving is one of the major holidays. It’s the day that we eat until our pants don’t fit, watch football and hang out with friends and family. It’s a day full of rich history as well as new traditions. We all have our own way to celebrate this holiday but most of us choose to surround the day around a Turkey. It’s delicious to eat and it’s fun to decorate our homes and classrooms with too! Turkeys also make fantastic themes for engaging activities, just like these Turkey Alphabet Play Dough Mats!

*Pair this with our Fall Centers and Activities!

Turkey Alphabet Play Dough Mats

What’s Included?

If you haven’t used any of our alphabet play dough mats before, you are in for a treat.

We include both upper and lowercase of each letter.

We choose fun themes for each set, which will help encourage kids to want to do the activity and practice letter formation.

Using The Turkey Play Dough Mats

Once you have done the initial prep of this activity, which is pretty simple, there isn’t much left to do.

What I like to do is print out each page and then laminate them. I have laminated them each single paged, but I have also laminated two pages, back to back. Which way you choose depends on how many kids will be using them and how often each letter will get used at one time.

I like to laminate them because it makes it easy to wipe off any excess play dough without ruining the pages. Once they are laminated they will last you forever!

Children can fill the letters in many ways:

• Creating balls of play dough to make a dotted line inside the bubble letters.
• Create snakes with the play dough to ‘write’ the letter.
• Fill the letter completely using play dough and play dough tools.
• Play dough tools can be used to ‘smash’ the play dough into the bubble letters, creating various textures on the letters.

RELATED RESOURCE: Alphabet Centers and Activities

Benefits Of Alphabet Play Dough Mats

Many children need a fun factor to encourage them to learn. This is normal and can be very easy to provide exciting and engaging activities for kids that will still help them learn.

Play dough on it’s own is an activity that many children enjoy, so adding in alphabet practice takes it one step further.

Learning Benefits:

• Play dough is a fantastic tool to help children strengthen fine motor skills, which helps with pre-writing as well as other skills.
• Play dough can be calming and stress relieving.
• This encourages development of hand-eye coordination.
• Play dough is an excellent sensory play activity.
• This can increase creativity and imagination.
• These specific play dough mats will help children with letter recognition and letter formation.
• This can help helpful for introducing beginning sounds.

These play dough mats would be excellent to use as a literacy center in the weeks prior to Thanksgiving!

Alternative Ideas:

Laminating also leads to many other options of use.

• These play dough mats can also be used with dry erase markers to write the letters inside the bubble letter.
• Fill letters with pom poms or other manipulatives
• Don’t laminate and instead use as color pages

Are you ready to grab these FREE Turkey Alphabet Play Dough Mats? Simply click on the large, blue download button below!

Then, hop on over to our Fall Color by Letter Printable Freebie!

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The Kindergarten Connection

Alex and the TKC team work together to bring you the best resources and activities for Pre-K and Kindergarten. It is our hope that this content helps you stress less and gain confidence in your classroom. Visit Alex on Instagram @thekindergartenconnection for more content and behind the scenes.

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