20 Ways to Use Playdough in the Classroom

Playdough can be one of the most useful tools in the classroom, but it is often overlooked.  Playdough is cheap to buy and easy to make, and brings out creativity and learning  Here are 20 different ways to use playdough in the classroom:

1.) Letter imprints – Know those letter magnets?  Press them into a ball of clay and you get amazing letter imprints which can be used for a letter recognition center.

2.) Counting balls – How many small balls can you make?  Can you count them?  Can you put them into groups of 10 so we can count by tens?

3.) Letter formation- Roll the playdough into the shape of alphabet letters, or numbers.  Or give students a coloring sheet in a page protector and see if they can fill in the letter.  Students can also practice writing words or their name.

4.) Shadow sculptures – Create a sculpture.  Place it on a sheet of white paper.  Shine a flashlight onto the sculpture.  Use a pencil to draw around the outside of the shadow.

5.) Create collaborative sculptures – Working together can be one of the most important skills we teach.  Give students a topic or a shape and ask them to create that together.

6.) Sculpt beginning, middle and end of a story – After reading or listening to a story, ask students to create a sculpture of the beginning, the middle and the end of the story.

7.) Have playdough olympics – Perfect for indoor recess.  Have students try to roll playdough balls into small containers or having stacking contests with small balls of playdough.  Have a committee create medals out of playdough.

8.) Measuring snakes – Have students create snakes of different lengths and practice using a ruler to measure how long each snake is.

9.) Work on forces – There’s nothing easier to push and pull than playdough.  Work on pushing and pulling with your hands and other items, blocks, marbles, strings, etc.

10.) Create maps – Work on landforms by creating mountains, rivers, lakes and plateaus onto a real or fake country.

11.) Create a scene from a book – After reading a story, have kids sculpt out what they have seen.  This helps them work on setting, as well as visualizing the plot.

12.) Three dimensional shapes – Get a real feel for the faces of three dimensional shapes by creating the faces with playdough.  This kinesthetic strategy will cement in the minds of students the properties of 3-d shapes.

13.) Imaginary play – Playdough can be turned into any variety of prop or costumes for imaginary play, from a superhero watch to a magic wand to the pizza we are going to eat for dinner.  The only limits are your students’ imaginations.

14.) Snakes & Donuts – This economics game allows students to explore trading, price, and supply and demand while creating snakes and donuts out of playdough.  Find the specifics of this game in this old blog post.

15.)Imprint fossils – Pressing leaves or bones into a piece of playdough is a great way to create a mock up of an imprint fossil. 

16.)  Create number sentences – Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division can all be practiced simply by making balls of playdough and labeling them correctly.

17.) Add fractions & mixed numbers – Work on fractions by having students practice creating “wholes” that are the same size and using plastic butter knives to cut the wholes into fractions.  This provides a clear visualization of what is going on when we add fractions.

18.) Visualizing fractions – Take those counting balls and create a fraction of a set or a fraction of a number easily.  Use different colors to make it pop out for students.

19.)  Create an animated video – Use an app like Stop Motion Studio, which allows students to use single frame pictures to create an animated videos.  They can use playdough to set the scene and take a picture every time something changes.  At the end, they put their pictures into the app and get a video of the movie.

20.) Create a sculpture of the main character before you begin to write your story.  - While creating the character, students should think about their character and what will happen to it in the story they write.

How do you use playdough in your classroom?

Letter Sticks – A Simple Literacy Manipulative

My youngest son is working on letter recognition and letter sounds, so I made him these easy letter sticks today.

 

The sticks are super simple – they are just craft sticks that I wrote letters on.  I do uppercase on one side and lowercase on the other, and always write on the front and the back, so there’s no way for kiddos to get confused.  I also make sure that I make at least two for each letter, sometimes more for those Wheel of Fortune letters (R S T L N E).

After I made these, I started thinking of all the ways that these could be used in word work and literacy centers.  So, I thought I’d share a few ideas with you:

 

1.)  Flash the letter – What’s the name?  What’s the sound?  Just like letter cards, this gives you an easy way to check where students are.  In fact, they can check themselves, and put the ones they know into one cup and the ones they don’t into another.

 

2.)  Matching uppercase and lowercase – As long as you have at least two of each letter, students can match the uppercase version with the lowercase version easily and increase their understanding of different forms of a letter.

3.)  Write out their name – Being able to spell their own name is an important pre-reading skill.  Help kids to spell out their own name by having name cards available to them, and then slowly remove the name cards from the center.

 

4.)  Spell simple words – First copying words from word wall cards and then creating words of their own, students can use this simple manipulative to build words.  Older kids can use these manipulatives to practice spelling sight words and spelling words.

5.)  Quickly change out word family words – Have students create the word family and change out the beginning.  Or have students use these in place of letter cards when playing the Making Words Word Family Centers available at our Teachers Pay Teachers store.

 

6.)  Work on alphabetical order – Let the kids put the sticks in order from A to Z.  Now can they do it from Z to A?

How could you use this simple literacy manipulative?

 

Kitchen Math Manipulatives

Flipping through a “teacher catalog” the other day, I was amazed at how many different math manipulatives there were out there.  Some were cool, some were helpful, and some were just silly things to spend your money on.  I tend to be on the cheap side, and buying a bunch of manipulatives that will take up space, gather dust and cost me a fortune just isn’t going to work for me.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my base 10 blocks, and fraction bars can be helpful, but most of what I need to teach math can be found in my kitchen.  Here are 20 math manipulatives that can be found in the average kitchen.

 

1.) Beans, seeds, nuts etc. – Counters and linking blocks are always a big part of math manipulative kits.  Any small, but not too small, legume works just the same.  Dried kidney beans, dried lima beans, dried black beans, sunflower seeds, peanuts etc.  All of these are the perfect size for counting and grouping into addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems.  Combine a few different types of beans or nuts into a baggie and kids can sort them, find the fraction of the bag that is _______, graph the contents of a bag, or find the probability of pulling a sunflower seed.  The sky’s the limit when it comes to a mixed bag of beans and nuts.

 

2.) Measuring Cups – Outside of the obvious capacity measurement, measuring cups can also be used to contain groups of counters for multiplication and division problems or work on skills like half full, quarter full etc.

 

3.) Toothpicks – Toothpicks can be used in a great variety of ways – from toothpick problem solving puzzles to creating 2-dimensional shapes or types of angles (add some mini-marshmallows and you can make 3-dimensional shapes too).  Combined with twist ties, toothpicks also make great bundles to help kids learn how to skip count.

 

4.) Cans and Boxes – Geometry and measurement can be almost completely covered with a few old cereal boxes and coffee cans.  2-dimensional vs. 3-dimensional shapes – check; right angles – check; area of a rectangle – check; area of a circle – check; perimeter – check; volume – check; surface area – check; cut a few apart and you’ve covered nets too!

 

5.) Straws – Straws can be used as non-standard measuring devices, as counters, and as mock base 10 blocks.  To make straws into base 10 blocks, take one straw, cut it into 10 equal pieces.  These small bits are your ones.  A full straw is your ten’s rod.  Tape or rubber band 10 straws together and you have 100’s “block”.  Use string to hold 10 hundred’s bundles together and have 1,000.

 

6.) Cookie Cutters – 2-dimensional shapes of all kinds can be cut quickly from playdough (or regular bread dough if you have it) with cookie cutters.  You can then use these cut shapes to work on area, perimeter, lines of symmetry, or any variety of other geometry or measurement concepts.

 

7.) Kitchen Scale – Work on measuring, reading a scale, converting between grams and kilograms, comparing weights, pretty much anything with measuring weight can be done with a simple kitchen scale. 

 

8.) Cookbooks – Following a recipe is a real life use for both measurement and elapsed time, however simply looking at a cookbook can provide you with problems for doubling, tripling, halving and quartering, as well as discussions about proportions.  Even though you can find so many recipes online these days, I always bring in my cookbooks for my Party Planning Math Project.

 

9.) Colored Cereal – Colored cereals, like Trix or Fruit Loops are ALMOST as good as beans when it comes to being used as counters.  I say almost, because cereal tends to disappear into little mouths and needs to be replenished often , where as none of my students ever popped dried kidney beans into their mouths! Cheerios makes a good counter too – and is good for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but colored cereals gives you the chance to work with fractions, probability, and graphing simply by having a variety of colors in one package.

 

10.)  Kitchen Calendar – For all the cute calendar sets out there, I always preferred a regular old kitchen calendar, where students can see the progression of time from month to month, instead of having a new month come and wipe out the last month entirely.  Have students cross out the days in a set pattern using crayons or markers, and they can even record on each day the temperature and weather of the day.  For anything else that comes with those calendar packets, I have always used my Daily Calendar Books and Number of the Day Posters.

 

11.) Twist ties – The world’s easiest counting links are made with twist ties.  If you have a variety of colors, you can work on patterns within your links.  Twist ties are also great for bundling straws, pencils or toothpicks for easy skip counting.

 

12.) Oranges – Any piece of fruit could be cut into pieces to work on fractions, but oranges are pre-sliced and child friendly!  They are a great manipulative for working with fractions and mixed numbers.  See this old blog post I wrote about using oranges to help students truly understand mixed numbers.

 

13.) Paper plates – Paper plates can be used to create fraction circles, student practice clocks or to practice measuring angles with a protractor.  Want a fun way to prove to kids that a straight line equals 180 degrees?  Take a paper plate and cut it in half.  Then, let the kids cut 2 – 4 angles from that semi circle (starting from a center vertex).  Measure and label each angle and then put them back together. 

 

14.) Candy bars – Like oranges, candy bars seem to be created for fractions lessons, as you can break them into pieces and easily use them to add, subtract or even multiply fractions.  However, candy bars can also make great manipulatives for area, perimeter and surface area.

 

15.) Timer – Practice math fact fluency, work on elapsed time or have students take turns timing who can define all of their math vocabulary the quickest.  Works great with my math fact quizzes.  Kitchen timers can be a great manipulative in lots of ways. 

 

What math manipulatives can you find in your kitchen?