www.mieranadhirah.com: Fun times with PLAY-DOH®

Sep 20, 2015

Fun times with PLAY-DOH®

A healthy imagination plays an important role in helping children learn, and for over 50 years, PLAY-DOH® has inspired young children to play, invent, experiment and sculpt their own unique creations.

Using PLAY-DOH® with young children is beneficial in so many ways. It helps with:

The malleable properties of PLAY-DOH® make it fun for investigation and exploration as well as silently building up strength in those tiny hand muscles and tendons, helping your kiddies prepare for pencil and scissor control later on.

PLAY-DOH® can be squashed, squeezed, rolled, flattened, chopped, cut, scored, raked, punctured, poked and shredded! And every one of these actions helps fine motor development in different ways, as well as hand-eye coordination and general concentration.

Even as an adult, you can actually find that the effects squeezing and pushing PLAY-DOH® into shape can be great for stress relief and therapeutic! Haven't you tried it... I know I have...

PLAY-DOH® is a fantastic way to practice letter and number work. Your kids can form letters of the alphabet, spell out their own name, make numbers, form 2D and 3D shapes, compare lengths/ thicknesses/ weights, count out rolled balls to match numeral cards, match and sort by colour and SO many more ideas too!

Of course, I am just stating a few benefits of playing with PLAY-DOH®... there are a lot more to be discovered....

That’s why the first-ever PLAY-DOH® Month is such exciting news! My daughter is thrilled as well about it and we hope to head over there....

From September 21 to 27 at Ground Floor HighStreet, 1 Utama, adults and children alike get the chance to create their own Malaysia-inspired masterpieces out of PLAY-DOH® – it can be anything you choose, be it sculptures or numbers and alphabets.

As you create and re-create, you also get the chance to participate in The Malaysia Book of Records attempt for the most PLAY-DOH® sculptures created in a single day on September 26 (Saturday), and a successful attempt will see your PLAY-DOH® creations on display for all Malaysians to admire, with the most creative sculptures winning exciting PLAY-DOH® prizes!

With PLAY-DOH® there’s really no limit to your imagination, and you can even work in teams or as a family to create something special by sharing ideas. As a tool to encourage learning and experimentation, it’s hard to beat PLAY-DOH® – through hands-on, structured play and encouragement children can learn many skills, from recognising shapes and colours to learning how colours mix and blend, and even social and intellectual skills such as collaboration and problem-solving.

You and your kids can get started to “Shape a Colourful Community” with some of these tips:

Step 1: Work as a team with your kids to imagine what everyone in the family think will best and most positively represent Malaysia. You can even draw your ideas out first using colourful marker pens, colour pencils, or crayons.

Step 2: Materialise your idea using PLAY-DOH® compound. Do experiment and encourage each other as you go along. You can combine the different colours and mix them well with fingers until they become a different colour, and use any other items you have ready in the house to press patterns and make various shapes with the compound.

Step 3: Watch as you and your children transition your flat design into a colourful 3D Malaysia-inspired masterpiece creation!

My daughter and I decided to do a map of Malaysia as well as a few things that represent Malaysia, which is the Hibiscus flower, a sea turtle and an orang utan .. (which I think did not exactly turn out the way it was meant to....huhuhu)

We drew a picture on a blue paper which symbolized the sea and put some of the PLAY-DOH® on the map to colour it... My daughter was very careful of her work and even used a toothpick to pick at the edges...