My Play-Doh Family
The other day we started learning about families and what each family member's traits are, today we furthered the topic by making Play-Doh family members.
If there is one thing a young kid loves, it is Play-Doh. It squishy, smells good, easy to mold, and a great outlet for little one's artistic imagination. We started buying Val Play-Doh at Wal-Mart every week if she was overall good that week, helps cut down on the unpleasant outbursts in public as well as home, and it turns out that it has made it to the top of my "favorite school supplies" list. So far we have used the universal school supply for making letters, learning colors, "art class" while I tend to Mommy things, and crafting her family members.
Making the Play-Doh family members can group many different subjects together, for this activity I have lumped social studies, art, and math all into one. You could even add in bible studies and language arts by reading about a family in the bible and then reenact the story with Play-Doh. You may wonder how a simple topic of a family can expand into all these different subjects, here are the perks I found while doing this activity:
Social Studies-Children become aware of their immediate family, the functions within the family and the role of a family in society
Art-Children will get to explore the art form of abstract, broaden their imagination, and learn their colors. They will also be able to improve the strength of their fine motor skills through the construction of their figurines.
Math-Improve counting skills by having the child count each family member, children may also visually use the figurines in word problems (example later in post)
Sounds like an extensive activity doesn't it? The best part is my daughter only saw this as a fun Mommy and me play date, so there was no retaliation (like usual when math is involved) and her mind sponged up all of the information I fed her. She even started making her version of mermaids so she would have more counting material.
Here is how our activity went.
1) I asked Val to make herself, Mommy, Daddy, and Baby Belle out of Play-Doh. As she carefully pieced together all of the parts to her figurines, we reviewed the topic of what traits each family member has (She had fun reminding me that I am her mommy because Baby Belle and herself came out of my tummy). We then discussed other people and the family's we see on T.V.
2) After she was done constructing her family, we started to act out some fun little skits. I let her play the parts of Mom and Baby Belle, while I stared as Val and Daddy. I think it gave her a big kick to switch roles with me and allowed her to sort of experience a mother's role in a family setting. Through this imaginative role play, Val was able to care for her little sister doll, "cooked" meals, and "cleaned" the imaginary house.
3) We then did a little bit of math with her figurines. We made a couch out of Mega Bloks and sat the figurines on the couch and I set a small little story to them. The story was "Mommy, Daddy, Val, and Belle were sitting on the couch together, watching a movie. During the movie, Mommy took Belle upstairs for a diaper change, leaving Daddy and Val behind." Then I asked her a series of questions that pertained to the story. I had her count the family members on the couch, then I had her count who was left on the couch after Mommy and Belle left the room, and then I had her put the answers from the previous questions together to make a subtraction equation and solve it. She made up four minus two equals two. Afterwards, we added in the mermaids for further addition and subtraction.
Here is the quick worksheet I made up to go along with our math lesson.
