You may have noticed that I've started making a few printable products lately {yay for free printables right} and that's because I recently discovered Canva and am firmly obsessed with creating all the things for my kids and the blog. My latest creation is this set of free Easter playdough mats which my girls have been loving.
These playdough mats are great for young kids from toddlers through to primary school students. Use the playdough mats for playing at home, as a daycare activity, for playgroup or in the classroom.
Playdough is such a fun multi-sensory medium for kids {and adults}. It provides visual and tactile sensory input and helps children develop necessary fine motor skills. Squishing, squashing, pinching, rolling, poking, pulling, cutting and tearing playdough helps kids build hand strength and use their pincer grip.
Playing with playdough is my 3yr olds favourite activity at the moment. It doesn't matter what colour she's using, if she has cutters or accessories to go with it or not... it will entertain her for ages. Every. Single. Time. She's spent hours getting creative with playdough the last few weeks, so I thought I'd mix things up and surprise her with her very own Easter playdough mats after kindy.
HOW TO PLAY WITH YOUR FREE EASTER PLAYDOUGH MATS
- Download the free template {below}
- Laminate the pages for durability
- Add playdough and/or loose parts
The PDFs are in A4 size so can be downloaded and printed as is to fit to a page in Australia, if you're printing using US letter size you may have to check the fit to page box. Once I printed out the sheets I laminated them straight away so that they can be used over and over. Our laminator is just a cheap one from Officeworks that I bought for home, I think it was only about $30 and it's still going strong years later. You can usually get cheap laminators from most stationary stores, department stores or online at Amazon or Amazon AU.
Once our sheets were ready I set them out with some playdough and a heap of loose parts in a tray. You can use any loose parts you like, we added feathers, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, beads and some mini carrots.
FREE PRINTABLE EASTER PLAY MATS
Please note these printables are for personal or classroom use only, they cannot be reproduced, published or sold in any form on any platform.
Each of the mats come with a decoration prompt as an idea for how the kids can decorate the mat, including a variety of making faces, decorating and adding eggs. The designs are deliberately simple to provide a blank canvas so the kids can be as creative as they like. The beauty of these play mats is every single time they play with them their creations will be different and each child will interpret the prompts differently.
I love how children aren't bound by the same logic we use as adults. For example the egg mat below I would decorate with spots, stripes, swirls, wavy lines or beads and gems whereas my 3yr old decided to use the playdough and loose parts to give it a face and arms. She took great pride in adding all the details and then gave it a carrot to eat.
She also decorated the chick different to what I expected, but I love that he has an extravagant sparkly eye.
MORE EASTER PLAYDOUGH MATS
The girls loved the Easter playdough mats so much that I made some extra ones and I've listed them in my Etsy store. The paid set includes 10 different play mat designs:
- Easter egg
- Easter basket
- Easter bonnet
- Hatching egg
- Backyard egg hunt
- Spotty egg
- Stripey egg
- Birds nest
- Bunny
- Chick
The playdough mats are also a great way to help develop language and other skills by asking open questions while the kids are creating. E.g How many Easter eggs are you going to put into the basket? What colour will the chicks feathers be? What animal is hatching out of the egg? How many whiskers will the bunny have?
Disclosure - This post contains some affiliate links for your convenience, which means I may earn a small commission at no cost to you, should you make a purchase.
