Kindergarten Preschool Toddler
PrintablesHolidaysFine Motor Activities
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If there’s any one thing that seems to capture the attention of nearly every toddler and preschooler out there, it’s playdough.
This squishy, moldable substance can be used to make anything you can imagine and is an excellent way to work on strengthening those small motor muscles.
Now, with the holidays approaching, a few colors of playdough and these Christmas playdough mats are all you need for hours of fun and learning while playing with playdough.
Printable Christmas Playdough Mats
As the holidays approach, start building your classroom centers with a variety of activities that prompt readiness skills such as shape and color recognition, labeling, building vocabulary, strengthening fine motor skills, and improving creativity.
Incorporate Christmas playdough mats into your daily routine and begin your holiday festivities.
How To Use Christmas Playdough Mats
These adorable mats only need to be printed, cut in half, and laminated.
Place them in your sensory centers or fine motor centers with some containers of playdough and let the children enjoy creating Christmas symbols.
Each of the mats has a word in a traceable font under each image so that your students can create the symbol and then use a dry erase marker to trace the word that goes with the picture.
These playdough mats can help develop hand strength as the children model the playdough to fit on the mat and small groups can work on the mats together by adding the details such as ornaments and stars on the Christmas tree. Allow the children time to suggest different details that can be added to the pictures to really let their creativity shine.
Parents and teachers, help build action vocabulary with younger children by using and modeling words such as roll, pat, pull, pinch, etc.
For older children color and shape words could be used as the children discuss each symbol.
You could even have the children make a checklist of what tools they will need to get to complete the activity. They can list the colors of playdough they need as well as any tools they would need to work with the playdough.
When they’re done building, they can also use the words on the bottom of each mat as visual cues for spelling.
Extending the Use of the Christmas Playdough Mats
After the children have made the pictures on the mats a few times, provide them with a piece of paper to draw their own Christmas playdough mat.
Have the children share their mats and encourage them to write the name of their symbol on the paper. Magnetic letters can also be used to spell the words on each mat.
Younger children can be provided with pictures of various Christmas items providing opportunities for imitation using an object.
Another game is to plan a race to see who can build their symbol first. Any way that you choose to use these playdough mats will get the students excited about Christmas and promote learning through hands-on activities.
