Busy Bag Swap: Day 5 (Playdough Mats)

Inspiration came from this post.

I learn so much from my friend, Rachel.  She is seriously a wealth of information in so many areas and probably gets irritated that I usually have a long list of questions ready to ask, whenever I see her. I used to see her every morning at 6 a.m. when we were in the same crossfit class.  I'd try to space them out..and ask them in small doses. (Go poke around on her blog. I promise you won't be disappointed.  I love her tub cleaner recipe!)  She's a doula and instructed us on the Bradley Method that we used with Oliver (remember how I promised I was going to write his birth story? Oops!) Maybe I can distract you with something EVEN MORE exciting than his birth story...ready? After a medically-eventful week, Rachel pretty much delivered her OWN baby last week in a hotel room a couple hours away from home! Go read it here!

Family: Josiah (5.5), Annalise (3), Micah (10 days old)


Blog address: www.supercinski.net

How do you spend your free time? I love to read, garden, work out, and sew in my free time. I also get to teach childbirth, help at births, and teach/help with breastfeeding on the side of being a wife and mom.

When you were a child, what was one of your favorite ways to spend your day? I remember spending my summers playing in the pool with my brothers and sister all morning, then curling up in my bean bag chair with a good book for the afternoon.

What is your fondest memory with your mom as a child? I had to go to a lot of far away doctor appointments as a young tween and teen, and my mom and I would make it a special day together with lunch and a long time in the car together to talk. I loved those simple, long days full of one-on-one time with her, since in normal day-to-day life, she was really busy working full-time and with four kids.

What does special time with your children look like? My husband and I try to spend special one-on-one time with our kids each week, though it is often doing very simple things such as working on a project together, running errands, cooking, reading and playing games. I love that special time doesn't have to be hard or complicated.

What is your favorite outdoor activity to do with your child? We spend a lot of time outdoors (when it is not 100 degrees out!), playing at the park, hiking at a park, riding bikes, or working in the garden.

My favorite blogs are: My favorite homeschooling blog currently is http://halfahundredacrewood.blogspot.com/ since she blogs a lot about supplementing Classical Conversations at home, which is the homeschool community we are a part of.

What is a tradition that you would like to hand down to your children? There are so many! I love the book, Treasuring God in Our Traditions by Noel Piper. It has really inspired me to be intentional with our special holiday traditions and more commonplace traditions. I hope to pass on traditions that clearly communicate God's love to my children and how much we love them. 

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Playdough mats provide your child with creative ways to use playdough, along with many learning activities to help with counting, shapes and fine motor skills.

   

Each bag contains a booklet of 20 different laminated playdough mats, playdough, and instructions.

The most basic way your child can play with the mats, is to give them the mats and playdough and read them the instructions on the top of the page and let them get busy.

You can also give your child additional instructions by telling them the number of objects to put on the page. On the number/shape mats, they can practice making the shapes and counting them, along with filling in the number outlines to practice early number writing. 

For children who can recognize numbers, you can use a dry-erase marker to write a number on the top of the image pages and encourage them to create that number of objects on the mat.

Another variation is to provide different colors of playdough for your child and give instructions such as, “On this mat, please give the crocodile four blue teeth,” to practice colors and numbers.

There are so many playdough mats available online for download or purchase, you can add all kinds of activities to your set of mats by opening the rings. If you don't want to laminate them, simply place them in page protectors.

For 26 playdough mat bags, I used:

• 26 little containers (I found these 4/$1 at HEB)
• 8 batches of homemade playdough  (probably half a bag of all-purpose flour was used)
• 2 containers of book rings ($5.75 each at Office Max)
• 12 pages of black and white printouts for each book ($18 of copies at Office Max)
• 8 pages of color printouts for each book ($13+$13 shipping at bestvaluecopies.com – we don't have a color printer)
• 1.5 packages of laminating sheets ($20 each at Sam's)
• 13 pages of printed instructions

This breaks down to about $3.50. In hindsight, I probably should not have made quite as many pages to the booklets as the printing and laminating sheets added up, but I had a hard time even narrowing it down to just these mats.

Here's how I did it:

1. I found several playdough mats online that I liked and downloaded the pdf files.
2. I designed the number/shape mats myself, along with several of the other pages using clip art.
3. I had them printed or made copies of them.
4. Then, I laminated the pages, back to back, and hole-punched each page, connecting them with rings.
5. Lastly, I made the playdough and divided it into the containers.

The playdough mats that I used that were already designed online include:

Chicken

Faces  (I only printed two of these, you can add more to your booklet if you would like)

Giraffe

Carrots

The first time I let my kids play with these, they kept my five and half year old busy for 20 minutes and my three year old busy for over 40 minutes. Enjoy!

Downloads:
Playdough Mats Instructions
Playdough Mats Booklet

**Terms of Use:
We'd love for you to feel free to use the files that the ladies in our Busy Bag Swap have worked hard to create, but please keep in mind that the printable images and files on this site are some of our ladies own exclusive designs. They have been generous enough to freely share them.

The terms of use for using the free printable crafts and activities are as follows:  You may share these printables with students, friends, neighbors and family or even with your child's class full of children. As long as you share for personal use only. Please do not post printables on a web site - instead provide a link back to the original posting on this site. Linking to the original page is both welcome and appreciated.

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