Play-Doh Learning

Hey y'all! It's Kourtney blogging from Mrs. Payton's Precious Kindergartners! We're starting our 5th week of school and I can hardly believe it! We have settled into our routines, I've finished assessments, I know what my kids know and what they need to learn, and we are well on our way with curriculum! But seriously...every day I still feel like this:



The first 2 weeks of school I was getting 10k-12k steps before 3pm...now is 8k-10k.  We are soooo busy!!

This year, my school is ALL ABOUT anchor charts.  Anyone else?!  There isn't enough wall space on the earth for the anchor charts we've been creating in room 201, but seriously peeps - these kids are getting something from them, so let me not knock them.  They even know the word anchor chart and they've learned circle map and tree map. Praise!

Last week, we learned all about shapes! We made a tree map with the title 2D shapes.  We added square, rectangle, circle, and triangle.  We added all the characteristics of each as we learned about them.  It was a great way to us to keep track of the information each day.

By Wednesday, we were ready to build the shapes since we knew the characteristics of them.

It's really important to me that they build them correctly with the Play-Doh.  For example, the triangle should be made of 3 "snakes", the rectangle should be made of 4 "snakes" etc.  I call them snakes because that's what we make, but each snake represents a side.

Each student in my room has their own can of Play-Doh (which is labeled), which is to prevent the sharing of germs...and also I'm a little OCD about mixing Play-Doh Colors.  If you don't have this luxury, you could make your own! 

Ingredients:

• 2 cups plain flour

• 1 cup salt

• 1 tbs oil

• 1 cup cold water

• 2 drops liquid food coloring

• What to do:
• Combine plain flour and salt
• Add water, food coloring and oil. Mix until ingredients are combined.
• Knead well.
• If consistency is too wet add a little plain flour.

Seems easy enough, right? The kids LOVE using Play-Doh to learn! We didn't get too much in the floor!  Some of my kids really need extra practice strengthening their fine motor skills and we could stand to use it as often as possible.  I have a Play-Doh center some weeks where students can make numbers, sets, sight words and more.

If you'd like to use these Play-Doh shape mats, grab them for free in my TpT Store!   

Do you use Play-Doh in your room? How?