It is true! Make your child some playdough and you are super charging their brain.

Playdough is a open ended material, meaning it can be used in multiple ways. Playdough is not just fun, it builds your child’s brain.

Fine Motor Skills

Fine motor skills are the skills that help you do small muscle movements, for example being able to pick up something with two fingers – pincher grasp. Playdough builds a child’s small muscles just by playing, rolling, folding, building with it.

Motor Strength

Pushing, pulling, molding, building and balancing all strengthen your child’s muscles. Research is starting to show that having coordinated muscles, both the big and small muscles supports complex thinking.

Creative Thinking

Ok, this is a no brainer, but still I need to name it. Playdough lets your child create anything! This helps them build understanding of the world, for example understanding how the cars work by starting to understand the parts of the car. It also builds their ability to think about many different things, which builds their ability to understand complex jobs as adults!

Language Development

When you are building all of those fun things… snakes, balls, houses, turtles… you will be talking about them. What kind of snake? Where does it live? Is it a mommy snake? All of these simple conversations build your child’s vocabulary. A large vocabulary indicates success in school and life.

Writing

Research shows that having strong fine motor skills supports writing ability later in life. Also you can practice “writing” with a pen in flattened playdough. It will give your child more “feedback” than paper. Meaning they will be able to feel their movements, and modify them easier than they are on paper. Also you can form letters out of the playdough, reinforcing your child’s understanding of the alphabet.

There is so much more that can be learned from playdough. What are your ideas? Share in the comments!