Free Printable Play-Doh (Play-Dough) Mats

All of my Middles and Littles enjoy Play-Doh.  It easily keeps them busy for an hour, sometimes all afternoon.  I had no idea how many free printable Play-Doh mats are out there until I started looking for them.  For Noah (5 with Down syndrome), these are especially helpful because of the fine motor involvement and the way these mats make playing with Play-Doh a language rich activity.

We’re working on learning our alphabet week by week, and this week is the Letter D.  As I got ready to print out a D-DOG Play-Doh mat, I remembered how much Noah likes feeding our cat, so I switched to the cat mat.  Here’s the link for both:

http://prekinders.com/2011/09/dog-cat-food-play-dough-mats/

And here’s a link for the plain dog we added Play-doh spots to:

http://www.makinglearningfun.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.makinglearningfun.com/Activities/fire/FireDalPlaydoughMats/FirDalPlayDoughMat-dog.gif

If you’re looking to save a few bucks, this is the perfect activity to load into sheet protectors instead of laminating sheets, and then if you place two back to back, you can fit both of them into one sheet protector.

Here’s some ideas from a SPL on how to use these kinds of mats in conjunction with speech therapy.  I just love it when I don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

http://chitchatandsmalltalk.blogspot.fr/2012/03/play-dough-mats-and-other-fun-stuff.html

And this is an idea I haven’t seen before, but it’s another great pre-handwriting idea.  This time, it’s with Play-doh.

http://storytime-storytime.blogspot.com/2011/10/blog-post.html

I like these face mats since Noah is still learning to identify facial features and we’ll be learning the five senses soon:

http://resources.sparklebox.org.uk/sb1312.pdf

Here are some basic shapes – Perfect for Noah!!!  This will also give us a chance to review our colors, as he will have to find the right color Play-doh for each shape.  If you already have a set of simple shape flashcards, you can use those for this activity since they usually are printed on glossy thick cardstock.

Thanks to all the bloggers and websites out there that make writing a post like this so easy.  Because they care enough to share what they’ve already done, we can put our energies toward actually using them instead of creating them.

Have fun!

–Alyson

Advertisement