Most children find playing with dough great fun. Toddlers love squeezing the soft material in their hands, exploring the texture and consistency of the dough. Older children enjoy playing imaginatively, making things.
Playing with dough also helps to develop necessary skills for many things your child will be learning throughout childhood! Shaping and molding the dough develops the fine motor skills needed for writing, tying shoes, and other fingers-required tasks.
Eye-hand coordination is also increased as the child pounds, sculpts, and molds his creation. You may even see an increase in attention span as your child concentrates intently on perfecting his creation. For children feeling grumpy and fed-up, pllaydough can be soothing and help them express their feelings.
Babies
Babies are too young to be given playdough as they tend to put everything into their mouth until about 18 months. Babysitter should carefully watch the infant. Instead give them lots of sensory experiences with finger-feeding, water play in the bath and supervised play in sand– at the beach, or in a clean sand pit.
Toddlers
Around 18 months is a good time for babysitter to introduce playdough to a child. At this stage the child will enjoy simply patting, poking and squeezing the dough. They may “taste” it, but will not usually eat large quantities. They may also enjoy finding things hidden in the dough by babysitter, and pushing things into it (popsticks, drinking straws, macaroni, plastic figurines).
Young Children
Young children will use the dough as part of their imaginative play (pretending to make birthday cakes or pizza, people or animals, etc).
Around 4 years of age, children like to help make the playdough (if you decide to make it yourself) helping you or your babysitter to measure, pour, mix and colour the playdough. This teaches the child about concepts such as wet/dry, full/empty, hot/cold, etc. You can encourage language and problem solving: “What do we need? What will happen next? How is the salt like the flour?