It’s a fact — kids are fascinated with bugs! They love learning about them, watching them, and creating them! Today I have the honor of introducing you to my friend Cerys at Rainy Day Mum, who is sharing about a fun playdough activity with minibeasts and bugs. Her blog has been one of my all-time favorite blogs! She has amazing craft ideas and a wonderfully unique way of incorporating teachable moments into her daily life with her kids (and the blogging world!) I know you are going to love her just as much as I do!
Take it away, Cerys…
Thank you to Leann for having me guest post about our minibeasts play dough fun. I’m Cerys and a mum to J (almost 4) and T (almost 2 and a half) and I put my hands up and say we have a slight obsession with playdough and also bugs.
As part of our recent Bug Week with The Virtual Book Club Summer Camp we read a great book by Giles Andrea and David Wojtowycz called Mad About Minibeasts. The marvelous minibeast in the book really inspired my toddler and preschooler to create their own so we set up an invitation to make minibeasts.
With a selection of goggley eyes, chenille sticks that we had chopped up, buttons, gems, pom poms and some pots of playdough (I normally make my own using the no cook playdough recipe from The Imagination Tree but had run out so instead used store brought stuff) and set it up on the table.
Sitting with the children we read one of the Mad about Minibeasts poems in the book and looked at the image and then got moulding to make our minibeasts out of the playdough.
It was a fantastic opportunity to talk about parts of the minibeasts as well – antennae was a new word for both my toddler and preschooler and now we spend many moments in the garden looking at the antennae on the minbeasts that we find out there.
Part of the way that we are encouraging J to learn to read is by reading familiar books with him very frequently and asking him to retell them to us explaining what is happening in the story – his current favourite is The Very Hungry Caterpillar and suddenly he was making 1 Very Hungry Caterpillar and as it’s a Monday he had to eat 1 Green Apple.
Playdough is fantastic for story telling as well as having added benefits that the moulding strengths the fine motor muscles in the hands needed for writing with control.
Check out some of our other Bug fun – We created a Giant Spiders Web to go with the book, The Very Busy Spider, have made simple puppets to go with The Very Hungry Caterpillars, been on a Bug Sound Hunt to bring the book The Very Quiet Cricket Alive and made simple butterflies and fun butterfly cakes.
This makes me want to pull out the playdough and our collection of Eric Carle books, and have some fun on a warm sunny day! Thanks, Cerys, for this great guest post! I’m certain you’ve inspired others to do the same!
If Cerys has inspired you with this post, please let her know by leaving a comment below!
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