Category Archives: For Professionals

Play-Dough Recipe

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playdough

Our students are often surprised to discover we make all our own play-dough. I tell them: you should make all your own play-dough!! It’s cheaper, it’s a much nicer texture to work with, and shapes much better than commercial PlayDoh. It also doesn’t dry out as quickly. Plus, I hate the smell of commercial PlayDoh… when you make your own, you can leave it unscented – my preference – or you can add scents with a few drops of essential oils or some spices. And making a batch takes only 15 minutes from start to finishing clean-up… or a little longer if your little one “helps.”

There’s LOTS of recipes out there. Here’s the one that works well for me:

Recipe 1

Boil 2 cups water (you’ll use just 1.5 cups to start with, but may add more later)

Mix together: 2 cups flour*, 1 cup salt, 2 tbsp. cream of tartar, 4 tbsp vegetable oil (note, 4 tbsp. is the same as 1/4 cup)

Mix in separate container: 1.5 cups of the boiling water plus food coloring – make the color STRONG! (If you use Betty Crocker Gel you’ll need 1/3 – 1/2 a tube in a batch)

Mix the colored water in with the other ingredients. Stir well. (If it’s still really sticky, you can stir in more flour now.) 

When it gets too hard to stir in the bowl, it’s time to knead. I knead in the bowl, but it’s likely easier to: spread a thin layer of flour on a counter or cutting board. When it’s cool enough to touch, place the dough on that and knead it. What you’re trying to do is create  good, consistent dough that’s just the right texture for kids to play with. If it’s sticking to your hands, add a little flour. If it’s too dry and crumbly, add a little hot water. (It’s a little different each time – if the weather is really humid, or really dry, that affects the dough.) Knead till it’s just right. Usually takes a few minutes. Then it’s ready for play!

When not in use, store in a ziplock or a closed plastic container. It keeps for weeks or months, depending on how frequently it’s used.

*Note: the recipe calls for 2 cups of flour but you mix in more later, so make sure you have a little extra available before you start!

Recipe 2 – A recipe my co-teacher Cym likes has slightly different proportions / ingredients, but the process is the same.

3 cups flour, 1 cup salt, 2 tbsp. corn starch, 4 tbsp. cream of tartar, 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 2 cups boiling water, food color.

Cloud Dough

While I’m sharing recipes, another Cym recipe that we use a lot is her cocoa cloud dough. Mix together 1.5 cups flour, 1/2 cup cocoa powder, and 1/4 – 1/2 cup of any edible oil (canola oil, safflower… whatever you’ve got.) For a big batch, 6  cups flour, 2 cups cocoa, 1 – 2 cups oil. How much oil you use depends on the texture you want. We use this in the sensory bin to simulate dirt so we want it pretty crumbly (it looks like dirt, but it won’t hurt any little ones who decide to eat it! and it smells good. See pictures on my other blog, Inventors of Tomorrow, here and here.) If you want to shape it more, use more oil.

Learn more about cloud dough at Babble Dabble Do.

Using Play-Dough

You can play with play-dough directly on most tables, but if you’re worried about your table, you can put out a plastic tray, place-mat or table cloth to play on.

In class, each week, we put out new tools with the play-dough. Using a variety of tools teaches small motor skills, strengthens hand muscles (helpful for learning to write), and teaches life skills. Here’s just some to try: rolling pin, cookie cutters, garlic press, a plastic knife, kid scissors, spatula, pizza cutter, pastry cutter, melon baller, wooden hammer, napkin rings (can cut circles of play-dough), a cup or container they can press down on dough to flatten a circle of dough, rubber stamps to press impressions in the dough. You can also mix other toys in with the dough – like plastic animals to leave footprints in the dough, toy trucks to leave tire tracks, shapes from a shape sorter tray, etc.

Pathways Developmental Screening Tool

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pathways

Pathways has sensory motor checklists for ages birth to 7 years. They’re available at https://pathways.org/

Parents check off how their child is doing in these areas: play and social skills, coordination, daily activities, and self-expression. The instructions state “It is important to look at your child’s overall tendencies and clusters of behavior. One or two concerns should not cause alarm. However, if your child is not frequently and consistently demonstrating more than a few of the listed items in each category, print the list, check your concerns, and discuss them with your healthcare professional.”

This is a helpful easy to use tool that’s free to use and can be copied freely. They also have good information on their site about Sensory Integration and signs that a child has a sensory issue.

You can also check out

Just for You – books featuring families of color

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Today I stumbled across a series of books called “Just for You!” They are 24 early readers for kindergarten to second grade, all written and illustrated by African-American authors and artists and featuring African-American children, often in urban settings.

I have only read one, which I really liked. (Lights Out by Medearis and Tadgell) Great illustrations, nice rhyme and rhythm to the text, a loving daddy, and a mischievous girl who sneaks out of bed to look at the city lights and make shadow puppets on the wall. So many children’s books feature Caucasian kids in pastoral settings, and the chance for an urban African-American child to see themselves represented in a sweet bedtime book is rare and, I’m sure, appreciated.

The book also includes a note to parents at the beginning about ways to read to your child: take a “picture walk” through the book, point out words as you read, and ask questions. At the end, there are suggested activities related to the story: making up a bedtime rhyme, looking out your own window and describing what you see and hear, making your own shadow hand puppets, and other things to talk about.

The Amazon reviews of other books in the series say they’re a little hit and miss in quality, so you may want to pick and choose from the best of them.

Here’s the full listing of all the books in the series. You can look up details and reviews on Amazon, and get them from your favorite online bookseller or your local library.

Inventors of Tomorrow: Class Structure

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process

I teach a Family Inventor’s Lab, a STEAM enrichment class for ages 2.5 – 7. However, this class structure could work for any play-based preschool / early elementary classroom.

We have designed the flow of the class so we begin with letting the children explore and discover on their own, making their own connections, and discovering their own questions before we give them any answers. After that, we talk about some big ideas, then send them to play with those ideas some more, then re-gather to share their conclusions. The maps above show the relation of this class structure to the scientific method and to an engineering process. Let’s look in more detail about how this works.

Set-Up: Before class, the teachers have set up a variety of hands-on activities related to the theme. They always include: building projects, toys for free exploration, art projects, some big motor activity, a sensory table and/or a water table, and books on the concept.

Discovery Time: The first twenty minutes is “discovery time.” We let the kids explore freely, trying things out hands-on, noticing patterns, and making their own connections and interpretations before we present the concepts of the day. Some children come in with a lot of prior knowledge on the day’s topic (like our resident paleontology fans on dinosaur day!) and quickly build on that knowledge. Others come in with virtually previous exposure to a concept, and are really creating connections from scratch. They are “gathering information.”

Opening Circle: We then have an opening circle with all the kids combined (up to 24 kids, ages 2.5 to 7). We ask them to share what they’ve seen and done. We ask them what they think the theme is and how the activities connect to it. After we’ve first grounded in what they’ve discovered, we introduce the key concepts of the day, and talk about the other activities we’re doing. Sometimes we’ll give them a challenge to work on during tinkering time.

Tinkering Time: They return to the activities with fresh information and interpretation, and have 30 more minutes to explore more, tinker more, and test out ideas.

Teachers encourage kids to test ideas, then adapt them a little, then test them again, to learn more about the topic. We also ask questions which extend learning.

Outside Time: We have fifteen minutes on the playground. We often have more ideas related to the theme that they can explore outside. But this is also a little time to just run off some steam, so they come back in better able to relax and attend to opening circle. (Learn about the mood and concentration benefits of outside time here.)

Conclusions Circle: In closing circle, we talk again about: what did you observe, what did you build, what did you test, what did you learn? We do more activities related to the theme, often including a book on the topic to wrap up the day’s concept.

A few days after class, parents receive an email, which often has follow-up activities they can do at home, or pointers to this blog to learn about activity ideas we had but weren’t able to fit into class time or logistics.

We find that beginning with hands-on discovery raises the children’s engagement. Kids are naturally curious, but this format specifically harnesses that curiosity as a learning tool. They arrive to the opening circle open and ready to learn more. If we started by “teaching” them, they wouldn’t learn as much.

Check out this great article: What’s Going On Inside the Brain of a Curious Child. (It’s from KQED’s Mindshift series which is full of fascinating stuff about how we learn!)

Questions Posters

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I created a new set of posters for the classroom on “Questions to Ask to Extend Learning.”

Educators frequently encourage parents and teachers to ask “open ended questions” as part of a facilitated learning process. But it may be hard for parents and teachers to think of good questions as they’re playing with a child in a classroom or at home.

Often, they end up asking yes / no questions, or quizzing kids for “the right answer.”

On Teacher Tom’s blog, he writes: “They say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but I beg to differ. We hear stupid questions almost every time adults and young children are together. Here’s [an] example: a child is playing with marbles, exploring gravity, motion and momentum. An adult picks up a handful of marbles and asks, “How many marbles do I have?” The adult already knows the answer. The child probably does as well… [These] questions take a child who is engaged in testing her world, which is her proper role, and turns her into a test taker, forced to answer other people’s questions rather than pursue the answers to her own.”

So, I designed these posters to hang around the classroom to inspire parents with some good open-ended questions. They offer ideas of what to ask that will take the child’s learning to a new level. Click here for a PDF file and you can print your own.

Sources for these ideas: