When kids are young, life is all about exploring the world around them, mixing creativity with curiosity and experimentation. So, it only makes sense that products like playdough are so successful, remaining a childhood favourite for decades.

But while doughs are always a great way to keep little ones busy, they are even better at helping them embrace hugely important skills and developmental abilities as they go along. In this article, we’re touching on some of the many ways playdough can teach and empower children to learn and grow.

 

What’s the big fuss about playdough? 

Products like Wild Dough are designed to get kids working their hands and smaller muscle groups, which ultimately leads to improving fine motor skills. But beyond all this, doing so encourages creativity and forces them to think outside the box when developing new concepts. As they shape, squish and roll the dough, they inadvertently use their imagination to form brand-new creations.

And what better way to let kids be kids?

However, if you really want to get down to the finer details, here are some spaces that playdough can provide endless benefits for.

Mathematics

While there are no direct equations and formulas involved (unless you make them), playdough is a great way to get kids thinking about mathematics and logic. They’re often put in learning scenarios where they need to consider things like shapes, sizes, and measurements.

Additionally, with a little imagination, playdough can also teach kids about numbers and counting, helping them to discover and extend their knowledge as they play. 

Phonic development

When it comes to learning, playdough is actually serious business. While children have been using products like this to engage in pretend baking for generations, recent years have seen an increase in the use of playdough for educational purposes, like scenarios of learning about letters, sounds and numbers.

Known as phonemic awareness, this concept allows kids to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words by learning how they vary from one another – and playdough can help develop just that. In fact, it’s also a critical pre-reading skill that lays the foundation for reading success in the future.

Tip: There are a number of ways to use playdough to support phonemic awareness skills. For example, you can model forming words with the dough while saying each sound out loud. Practising this over and over with your child will help them to develop this crucial skill and retain information for future use.

 

Social skills

Playdough can teach kids essential social skills by promoting learning around sharing, taking turns and cooperating with others.

In other aspects, this toy is also handy in allowing them to express their emotions and imagination to those around them, using the dough to create faces, creations and objects to reflect their way of thinking.

Final note

Lastly, playing with play doaugh is just plain fun – even for the bigger kids! It's a great way for kids to explore creativity and get imaginations working hard, so there’s never any going wrong by including it in your own toybox at home.