Fine Motor Skills

Play-Doh Activities and Their Benefits

Play-Doh activities are the perfect way to assist in the development of your child’s fine motor skills. It also helps with bilateral coordination skills too. There are numerous benefits of having your child play with Play-Doh.

Benefits of Play-Doh Activities

1. Provides a Good Sensory Experience

Play-Doh offers a great sensory medium, helping kids struggling with sensory processing disorder. Sensory seeking kids can squash, squish, gloop and pound the Play-Doh to provide themselves with positive tactile and proprioceptive feedback.

2. It’s Soothing, Comforting and Therapeutic

If your child has struggled with trauma in their lives like a serious illness in the family, divorce or death of a relative, playing with Play-Doh can be very beneficial. The pediatric occupation therapist will most likely use Play-Doh when working with your child with sensory integration issues.

3. Coordination Skills Development

Playing with Play-Doh can help develop your child’s coordination skills. They’ll use hand-eye coordination when using a cookie cutter in the dough or to poke, cut and prod the Play-Doh

Different Play-Doh Activities

1. Make Pancakes

This is an easy way of providing ideal proprioceptive input and you can expand it into a visual motor activity as well. Have your child roll the dough into a ball and using both of their hands, push it flat to form a pancake.

Have them stand up for added input to the arms and hand and push their body weight into their hands, making the pancake flatter. Have them use a spatula to flip their pancakes.

2. Roll it

Children love to roll Play-Doh. Give your child a rolling pin to create a fun design or make fun shapes and lines. Your child will need to grasp the rolling pin on the ends while putting pressure on the Play-Doh to smooth it out. This helps to strengthen their fingers and hands.

3. Make Spaghetti

Have your child roll the dough out into long noodles. This helps them practice controlled movements of their hands and fingers. They can then roll small balls of dough to make meatballs.

These are only several of the many Play-Doh activity ideas you can use to have your child use their hands and build their fine motor skills.

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