Making a Play Park with Play Dough

We love going to the play park and have already spent many sunny days playing on swings and slides and climbing over climbing frames this summer. So I wasn’t really surprised when our play dough became a play park one rainy afternoon. I was inspired by Puttisworld to try some construction with cocktail sticks and play dough. I was hoping to talk about squares and triangles, but imagination took hold and we ended up with a mini play park.

This is our recipe for play dough:
2 cups flour
½ cup salt
2 tbsp oil
1 ½ cup boiling water
Squeeze of lemon juice
Generous splash of red food colouring


I adapted this from one I found on The Imagination Tree where you can find many recipes and wonderful ideas for play dough play.


So, we started with this:

Pink Play Dough and Cocktail Sticks

And ended up with swings:

Play Dough Swings

A slide:

Play Dough Slide

Balancing bars:

Play Dough Balancing Bars

And an interesting climbing frame:

Play Dough Climbing Frame

Actually, I did most of the design work and B made interesting shapes with the dough (the climbing frame is all his) but we had a great conversation while working with the play dough and I hope I sparked his creativity for the possibilities of play dough.

Using Play Dough to Make Train Accessories and other things

I recently decided to make an effort to bring more play dough into our playtime after being inspired by The Imagination Tree (again!).We play a lot with trains, we talk a lot about trains and train are often the first choice for ramdom You Tube video watching. We have a train set but often find we have accessories missing as our games develop. So we started making train set accessories out of play dough.

Here is our first creation - a crossing:

Play Dough Level Crossing with Plastic Light

 We used this no-cook recipe (scroll down a little!) for the ramps and the gate holders, a cocktail stick for the gate, and a foam bead from a threading set with a broken cocktail stick for the hinge. I was really impressed with our work and wanted to make more. However, my nearly three year old had moved on to other things. So we made some random objects:

A stick, a spacecraft, an imprint of something I can't remember and a couple of wiggily woos*

But we'll be adding to our train set soon. We need a lot of accessories as the train stories just keep on growing. Do you have any ideas? Please comment and let me know.

In addition to the marvelous wonders of play dough, which you can read about via the links above, we also:

• talked about height and width as we measured the parts
• discussed the purpose of gates and hinges
• waited for parts to dry before we could play with them
• extended the possibilities for his pretend play 

For more play dough ideas, have a look at others who took the PLAY DOUGH PLEDGE

*We read about Wigglily Woos in this Sir Charlie Stinky Socks book by Christina Stephenson