Play Dough Cake Shop Maths
Play dough is an easy to make, inexpensive, modelling material. It can be made out of just a few ingredients and is a great resource for focused play activities.
Check out Play Dough letter fun for our play dough recipe or print a free copy here
Last week, we had fun shaping play dough into snakes and developing the vocabulary of the maths concept, length.
Today, we used play dough to make cakes and used them to develop our addition skills and introduce multiplication as repeated addition.
Maybe next time, we will make play dough fruit and use it to develop our subtraction skills and introduce division as repeated subtraction.
Be a maths detective
Ask questions that develop mathematical understanding and problem solving skills.
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How many cakes do you have altogether?
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If I have 2 cakes in blue cases and 2 in yellow cases, how many cakes do I have altogether? How do you know?
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If I buy 2 cakes and you buy 2 cakes, how many cakes do we buy altogether?
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I need 4 cakes altogether. I have chosen 2 green cakes. How many more cakes do I need?
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This cake costs 1 pence and this cake costs 2 pence. How much do they cost altogether?
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Cakes in blue cases cost 2 pence each and cakes in yellow cases cost 3 pence each. I have 10 pence to spend. What cakes can I buy? Is there more than one answer to this? How do you know?
Activity also develops:
Fine motor skills and Hand-eye co-ordination:
- Using play dough in tactile play and manipulating it by squeezing, squashing, rolling, cutting and flattening helps to strengthen finger and hand muscles and develop hand-eye co-ordination.
Language skills:
- Making play dough provides an opportunity for developing listening and instruction following skills. Vocabulary can also be developed as you introduce and use words like twist, roll, bend, pinch, squash, twist.
Creativity
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