Play-doh Letter Fun

(38 Months)

Little Miss loves play-doh.  C'mon, who doesn't love playing with play-doh.  She loves squishing and pressing molds into the play-doh.  She loves adding Mr. Potato Head accessories into the play-doh.  She loves making pancakes and muffins for her babies out of play-doh.

Today we decided to practice rolling the play-doh into snakes or ropes, and then form the snakes into capital letters.  My plan was to practice the letters with just horizontal and vertical lines (E, F, H, I, L and T).  Little Miss had her own plan (as she frequently does), she wanted to create the letters in alphabetical order.  She's only three and she's already so determined.  Oh boy!

I used sidewalk chalk to draw the letter on her picnic table and offered her the chalk to trace the letter.  Next, we created rolled snakes out of the play-doh.  Creating evenly rolled play-doh snakes are still hard for us.  I was proud of Little Miss for practicing again and again, even though she was frustrated at times because the snakes would sometimes split apart in the middle.

  

For the first few letters, I gave her the appropriate number and lengths of snakes.  She carefully placed the rolled play-doh on top of the chalk letter, "squishing it together" at the corners to form the letter (I love how she describes what she's doing).

As we neared the letter E, she started creating her own lengths of snakes, and if they were too short, she would tear off a piece of another snake to complete the line or curve.  She continued working all the way through the letter M, and then she asked if she could stop.  I was thrilled that she kept happily practicing letter after letter.  We gladly put away the play-doh and she began building with blocks.

I'm so proud of her.  I love my little (sigh, big) girl.