Playdough games for adults
Playdough Pictionary Game - The Idea Room
While buying school supplies for our older kids this last week, play dough made it into the cart too. Most of us have play dough around the house somewhere. Instead of making pancakes and snakes, put it to use with this fun family game. This is perfect for kids and adults of all ages. In fact, my husband and I love to play after the kids have gone to bed.
You Will Need…
PLAY-DOUGH
Different colors is really fun, but one color will work just fine also.
LIST OF WORDS
I have included a list of words for you at the end of the post to get you started. Add other words you think would be fun, or that would work for your family.
How to Play
Divide into teams.
Give each team play-dough. We like to give each team a few different colors.
Print off one copy of the words (listed below) for each team.
Cut the words into strips and put them in a bowl or baggie.
When you say “GO”, one person from each team will choose a word out of the bowl. They will attempt to “SCULPT” that word for their team using the play-dough. They cannot talk, make noises, use actions, or anything else. They can only use the play-dough. The rest of their team is trying to guess what they are making.
Once someone on their team has guessed, the next team member pulls another word out of the bowl and begins to sculpt.
This continues, everyone taking turns sculpting, until all the words in their bowl have been guessed. The team to do this first, wins.
*VARIATIONS*
Instead of going through the whole bowl of words to win, you can set a timer. When time is up, the team with the most words guessed, wins.
Small teams, such as teams of two will work just fine.
If you are playing with just two or three people, take turns sculpting for the whole group, and keep score as individuals. (Set a timer, sculpt, and if your word is guessed in the time frame, you get a point.
The person with the most points at the end of the game, wins.)
If your children are small and can’t read yet, instead of words, draw pictures and put those on the different slips of paper. Or even create a separate bowl that holds the picture clues. When it is an adults turn, they pick from the words. A child’s turn, they pick from the picture clues.
If you have a really big group. Put one person in charge of the list of words. Send one “sculpter” up from each team to get their first word. They have to run back and sculpt. As soon as their teammates correctly guess the words, a new person from their group runs up to the person with the list and they given their next word. This lets teams run and move around and adds even more fun to the game. The team who successfully gets through the whole list first, wins.
List of Words (print off one copy for each team. Cut the words into slips of paper and put in a bowl or baggie)
Octopus
Engagement
Ring
Truck
Balloon
Music
Apple
Tree
Cat
Shoe
Telephone
Dragon
Bee
Thinking
Rain
Grapes
Blocks
Rectangle
Group
Submarine
Deer
Igloo
Bow and Arrow
Flower
Dog
Guitar
Rectangle
Blocks
Light Bulb
Door
Train
Wand
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So if your preference is a tub of pre-made play-doh or a mound of homemade dough please read on enjoy any suggestions you find relevant. This list is a beginning, if you've any suggestions you'd like to share please feel free to get in toucch, email: 
Use curling ribbon as shredding element and the neck section from plastic bottles to help keep the balloons open enough for easier filling. 
Plasticine games.
Sculpting and appliqué It is well known that modeling exercises develop fine motor skills, spatial thinking, and fantasy. But not all children know how and love to sculpt. If your baby turned out to be indifferent to plasticine, do not worry. In addition to sculpting mushrooms and rolling sausages, there are many other ways to use this wonderful material. Offer your child something that he probably won’t refuse - just play.
Plasticine theater
A child's acquaintance with plasticine can take place at 8 months, or even after two years. But, in any case, it will most likely begin not with self-sculpting, but with observing your actions. The kid will order the production of new and new figures, with pleasure crush your most successful crafts, try to eat a piece of plasticine on occasion or throw it away.
And parents will have to sculpt. And not just sculpt, but with enthusiasm, joy and surprise, extract a kitten or a mouse from a block-house (or a snake, if modeling is not your strong point).
Fortunately for many parents, no special artistic talent is required. The created figures should be so simple that in the near future it would be possible for a child to repeat them. But acting skills will have to be developed. It is good if the fashioned little animal, to the delight of the baby, sings a song to him, tells about his life or asks questions herself.
When a child gets used to such an unusual toy, you can act out the plot of a famous fairy tale by modeling all its characters. Moreover, it is better to sculpt in the course of a fairy tale. For example, together with the baby you call: "Cat! Go drag the turnip" - and at the same time sculpt a cat figurine.
Over time, the child can become a full-fledged actor in your theater and, perhaps, he himself will want to invent and create doll figures.
Educational games
If your child is a fan of all kinds of educational games, he will surely like the activities offered. For many children, voluminous plasticine manuals will seem even more interesting and understandable than board-printed games.
Gather toy animals around the table and mold suitable food for them. Several such games, and the child will easily remember that the sheep loves grass, the cockerel loves grains, and the cat loves fish.
Another lesson can be devoted to sculpting a little man. Make a body-sausage, attach a ball-head to it and stop. Let the kid advise what else to fashion, whether one hand is enough, where to attach the leg. If the child cannot tell, the adult must say for himself - what he is doing, why. When studying the structure of the body, do not forget about the parts of the face. Fashion eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Let the child arrange them on his head or show you how to do it.
Blind flat and three-dimensional geometric shapes. And then show how, with the help of a few additional details, the ball becomes an apple, and a few triangles become flower petals. An older child will be able to lay out pictures from flat figures himself.
Another magical game is to sculpt not just static figures, but their transformations.
To involve the kid in the gameplay, ask him to "pick leaves", pinching off pieces of plasticine and feed the caterpillar you molded. The caterpillar "eats" each leaf extended by the child, becoming longer and thicker. And then demonstrate how she hides in a cocoon and then comes out of it like a butterfly (you need to sculpt a butterfly as quickly as possible). No less bewitching will be the transformation of a flower growing from a seed or the metamorphosis of a frog.
If your activities are long enough that the child does not want to destroy all the crafts, play generalization. Arrange all the molded figures into categories - transport, food, animals. If the baby likes it, next time invite him to sort fruits and vegetables into two groups, separate edible from inedible or domestic animals from wild ones.
A child who has been watching modeling for a long time can play riddles. Tell your child that you are going to make an animal (food, transport, flower) and let him guess who you are creating before the figure is finished.
Learning colors
If your child doesn’t know colors yet, during modeling (as well as during all other games and activities), constantly call them: “We’ll make an apple out of red plasticine. Now give me a piece of green plasticine, it will be a leaf. .."
A good plasticine will surprise even a child who is confident in all the colors of the rainbow. Take 5 small pieces of red, yellow, blue, black, white. With their help, you can build the entire color palette (before showing something to the baby, check whether the plasticine really gives the right color when mixed). First, combine the primary colors in pairs and show how the colorful two-color lumps turn into green, orange and purple balls in your palms. White and black impurities will add lighter and darker shades to the palette. Experiment with different mixtures and proportions with your child. It will be enough for the kid to lay out multi-colored balls on a plastic plate. With an older child, stick pieces of plasticine on cardboard and connect each color with the colors that participated in its preparation with lines.
Tell and demonstrate to your child that if you mix all the colors, you get a piece of ugly, dirty gray or brown. To prevent this from happening, have your child help you sort the plasticine by color at the end of each lesson.
Plasticine fantasies
The result of the first attempts of the child to mold something, most likely, will be something "incomprehensible-wonderful". And no problem. Think of a name for this creature. Blind him food, toys, and then friends. Although such games do not teach sculpting, they develop imagination and freedom of creativity.
A child who is starting to find his place among people will benefit from social games. Sculpt whole families of animals, men or fantastic creatures. Play different situations with them. Such games will help to unobtrusively demonstrate to the child the recent conflict, rehearse the upcoming trip to visit, teach them how to get to know and communicate with children. An adult can control all the characters, but it is better if the child takes on some role.
Plasticine cooking
Before sculpting something by yourself, the child needs to learn how to make sausages and balls, cut them with a knife, turn the balls into cakes. It's just not fun to do it that way. But cooking various dishes with your mother is an exciting experience.
The baby can cut sandwiches from bread and cheese made by an adult. Or flatten lumps of blanks to make cake layers. Instruct the baby to roll small balls of sweets or berries, sausages sausages. Surely the child will want to participate in decorating dishes. Plasticine food will serve as props for games in the store, cafe. Or it will become a treat for visiting dolls and animals. Such a plasticine lunch is a good occasion to give the baby a first idea of fractions and division (of a pie or a cake), to teach how to compare (the number of guests and the number of sandwiches), to practice addition and subtraction.
Exercises for small fingers
The use of plasticine for fine motor skills lies in the modeling itself, and not in its result.
It is important that the baby crushes plasticine, tears off pieces from it, rolls them between the palms. And, of course, the easiest way is to get the crumbs to perform these actions in a playful way.
Hide a "treasure" in a piece of plasticine - a small toy wrapped in foil for safety. Let the kid find it. Over time, make it harder by using more clay and a smaller toy.
Make prints of various plastic toys, shells, coins on plasticine cakes. When the child grows up, such prints can be filled with plaster, getting interesting crafts.
Take a small plastic baby doll and have your child pinch off pieces of plasticine and "dress" the doll. You can stick with other toys. Or use a picture on cardboard to which you need to add the missing details - plasticine leaves for a tree, a pattern on butterfly wings, a road for a car.
Roll out a piece of plasticine and use it as a drawing and writing surface. Or invite your child to lay out a pattern of cereals, beans, pasta of various shapes.
Perhaps the kid will like not to sculpt, but to collect figures from blanks. Mom sculpts balls - the child makes a snowman out of them.
Plasticine is also useful for fastening natural materials, shreds, matches. You yourself will be surprised how easy it is to teach even a one-year-old baby to create quite recognizable crafts. The plasticine sausage studded with toothpicks looks exactly like a hedgehog. If you stick two pairs of maple seeds instead of toothpicks, you get a dragonfly. A shell and two matches-antennas will turn a piece of plasticine into a snail.
A few tips to make modeling even more fun
- You can sculpt not only with plasticine. Invite the child to work with salt dough, clay, wax, modeling mass, plastic, ball plasticine. Each new material will give a special tactile sensation and unusual opportunities for creativity.
- Along with plasticine, get the necessary tools: molds, stacks, rolling pin.
They will not only add variety to the modeling process, but also make many tasks easier for the baby. Using a rolling pin, it is very easy to roll out plasticine into an even layer. And cutting it with a stack is better than tearing it with your hands. - Allow the use of other materials in games with plasticine - beads, buttons, sticks, pebbles, shells, scraps of colored paper, foil.
- Visit the museum especially for the sculptures on display. Walking around the city, pay your child's attention to the monuments. It will be no less useful to go to an exhibition of applied art, to study crafts made from clay and other similar materials.
* * *
Perhaps, being carried away by playing with plasticine, the kid will fall in love with this material, and soon he will create machines, animals, people. Or maybe modeling will remain an uninteresting activity for the child. But thanks to the games (proposed in the article and what you come up with with your baby), the purchased set of plasticine will not gather dust on the shelf, but will bring a lot of benefits and joy.
What to mold from plasticine with a child? Piggy bank of ideas!
Plasticine is the most educational toy. A child may not have dolls, cars, a phone, but plasticine must be at home! Modeling gives the child the opportunity to model the world and his idea of it. This is the most tangible and simple form of artistic creation and self-expression.
There are a lot of options for what interesting things you can mold with a child from plasticine. Below are several options for educational and educational games.
Plasticine construction set
Plasticine construction set is a DIY construction set. In order to make it, you need to roll up balls of plasticine and connect with match balls, toothpicks or sticks. First, build light geometric shapes (broken curve, square, triangle, rectangle, rhombus, polygon). Then start building more complex shapes (star, human, cat, dog, unicorn). Then move on to three-dimensional figures (cubes, pyramids, houses).
Turn on your imagination, and you can get real building masterpieces. We got the residence of the President of Russia.
Plasticine theater
Plasticine theater is a theater where you and your child make characters and scenery (can be used from the previous game). But first, of course, you need to come up with your own script or just start staging a familiar fairy tale or story. For example, you can put on the fairy tale "Gingerbread Man" or simply play with your child his favorite series from the cartoon "Fixies".
Plasticine letters and numbers
Plasticine letters and numbers is a very educational game. Blind your names and surnames with your child, next to them, blind the numbers indicating your age. Then, from the stuck letters, invent new words, make different sentences from words and numbers. Even if the sentences are illogical and meaningless, then this is your family cipher - a secret password that only you know.
Here is such an educational plasticine game of scouts.
Plasticine appliqué
Plasticine appliqué is a revelation of the child's artistic talents. But at the same time, both hands work and develop, and, consequently, both hemispheres of the brain. Also in the process of modeling, you can learn the names of colors, the division of colors into cold and warm (except for white and black - these are neutral colors) and understanding the basics of mixing colors. You can make any application, even a self-portrait. We have such works.
Plasticine unloading
If you see that your child is upset about something, but hides his feelings or he just has no mood, then he needs psychological unloading. And again plasticine comes to the rescue. Invite the child to mold any figures and play with them. Then ask him to blind what upset him. And talk through the figures, try to establish contact with the child and get him out of his upset state.
