Christmassy Playdough Mats – Free Printables! – Sensational Learning with Penguin

For our advent activity no.21, I made these playdough mats for Penguin, to use with the three types of scented playdough that we’d made the previous day.

I simply drew the pictures and laminated them. I also got out some beads, pipe cleaners, googly eyes etc, for decorating the playdough motifs. It was good fun to work/play with these, and they also provide opportunities for practicing hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, scissor skills (Penguin cut pieces of the pipe cleaner and the string of beads), shapes, colours etc. The playdough itself offers tactile and olfactory stimulation, and working with it also gives some proprioceptive input.

I’ve included our mats as printable pdf:s at the bottom of this page so that you can enjoy them too, if you so wish. Recipes for the playdough we used can be found in my previous post

I think these could be useful for communication practice, too. I’ll have to have a little think about how to do that in a meaningful way, trying to incorporate more than ‘just’ requests. If you have any suggestions I’d be excited to hear them!

The Gingerbread Man is one of Penguin’s favourite books at the moment (and it has figured in a previous post here). He was quick to add a little button nose on his playdough gingerbread man, just like the one in his book has, which I hadn’t thought of when making my drawing.

We used a set of cutters for our heart mat, and you could easily make a similar one yourself, drawing around cookie cutters you have at home. If you use our printable mat, you’ll need to cut freehand.