Letter Formation with Play Dough

We used several of our favorite play dough tools to get the material just perfect for working on letter formation and spelling! Our kids are always excited to work with play dough so this simple invitation to play and learn added a bit of hands on literacy and fine motor work to our day.

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I think we own almost every Play Doh tool imaginable! Our kids are huge play dough fans! While you could certainly roll out the dough into snakes to create letters and spell words, this process made it a bit more challenging for our kids and required them to work different hand muscles.

The extruder we used creates these perfectly uniform long thin lines of play dough. Not only that, but it creates three at a time for efficient letter formation.

(Don't worry, I'll share this tool and others we love for our play dough creations at the end of this post!)

(And yes, we're playing outside. It's been a long winter and yesterday was warm and I like to take the play dough (and every other play activity) outside whenever possible!)

Our preschooler has been learning how to spell and write his name so first we modeled how to make these letters for him. He named the letters and chose the colors of play dough. We use Handwriting Without Tears language for the letters so a D is a "big line, big curve."

His older sister enjoyed creating the letters to spell her name independently. I plan to use this activity again to review tricky spelling words that she's been practicing!

"Hey, look, Mom! The letter a also makes a pretty cool ring!"

What's better than letters you can create, then touch and pick up? Sensory experiences help solidify learning in kids' brains!

We used the extruder included with the Play Doh breakfast set. We also used plastic scissors to trim the lines to the lengths we needed. These play dough extruders also look like loads of fun! What are your favorite play dough tools?