How Playdough Affect Children's Development

In this essay I am going to explain how playdough helps improve physical, intellectual,

emotional and social development. My main research for this essay is primary, the rest

of the class and I played with playdough and discussed the benefits of it based on what

we were doing and how we reacted to it, trying to put ourselves in the place of the child.

Perhaps the most obvious area of development that it helps is physical, children

develop fine motor skills in their fingers and hands when playing with playdough. They

grasp, mould, twist, poke, squash and roll the playdough all the while learning to

manipulate it and discovering it’s properties. Most objects are new to children, playing

with playdough also helps development of

the senses. It has a strong but not disgusting

smell, it is not poisonous so children can taste it (even though this is not

recommended), it comes in bright colours and it has a strange texture, the only sense it

doesn’t have a big affect on is hearing.

Playdough also helps with emotional and social skills (these to are very often linked).

When I was playing with the playdough my friend kept stealing mine although she

already had a bigger piece. This made me feel frustrated, angry and sad, she was being

aggressive, possessive and not taking the feelings of others into account, we both

represent the two types of children you usually get in play groups, the one who has stuff

taken away from them and the one who takes it. The quiet children who don’t stand up

for themselves need to learn to communicate so they can explain to the other child how

they feel, the child who takes the playdough needs to learn that other people have

feelings and that they can’t always have what they want.

Many children may not have

experienced these before, by going out to play groups and having to meet other children

and share they playdough fairly will help them learn these basic but very important

skills.

The last type of development that playdough speeds up is intellectual, playdough helps

them visualize the concepts of colour, hot/cold, numbers, size, shape and others just by

doing different activities with them. Colour can be shown through the many different

colours of playdough, hot/cold by letting children role it around in their hands so they

can feel the heat difference, numbers and size by splitting it up into different pieces and

counting them, and shape by moulding different shapes out of it. It also helps children

express ideas (this is closely linked with emotional and social), when children cannot

communicate effectively they can make stuff out of playdough, this helps them express

their feelings and experiences whilst also helping their recognition of shapes and

objects.