Our big event today consisted of making play-dough. We were able to let everyone get super messy and tried to provide everyone with lots of time to explore the ingredients in a relatively open-ended way. Each student was provided with his or her own bowl and was given a bit of each ingredient to explore mixing in that bowl. At the end, everyone's dough was mixed into one big batch for us to play with.
Playing in this way provides nice opportunities for children to explore a variety skills and sensations:
- sensory integration
- tactile learning
- child driven exploration - whether the child wants to observe others; or stir, smoosh, drop the mixture
- experience in the transformation of materials - like the dry flour becoming sticky
- exposure to vocabulary in relation to the experience - sticky, pound, pat, mix, stir, combine, dry, wet, powdery, slimy...
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