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My youngest had just turned three, with big black olive eyes and a mop of curly, tangled hair to match. She loved dresses and lollipops and had a favorite pair of leg warmers that she’d squeeze over her legs, whether she was wearing pants or tights. She was humming a preschool song about squirrels and nuts as her chubby little hands squeezed a ball of homemade purple, sparkly playdough.
For twenty minutes, she was completely involved in a world of her own creation. Humming to herself, pressing eyes and buttons into little blobs of dough, bending string into legs, all while tending to the baby dolls that were carefully placed around the kitchen, each in its own cozy nest of fabric scarves and play silks. I stood at the counter, sipping cold coffee and watching her play.
Earlier that morning, while she and her older brother were crashing their OJ cups together, gleefully shouting “Cheers,” and stabbing their forks at soggy, syrup-drenched waffle bites, I decided to put out a tray of playdough on her little toddler table in the corner of our kitchen to see what would happen… It worked in my preschool classroom, so why not at home?
Later, when we got home from preschool drop-off and errands, groceries threatening to burst through the thin brown bag that housed them, and the frozen food starting to drip, I quickly opened a tightly sealed jar of playdough from my pantry, dumped the heavy, dense ball in the middle of the tray and filled the other sections with googly eyes, some bits of string, and a small pile of jumbo colored buttons.
I set it out on her table, and I didn’t say anything about what to make. I didn’t even draw her attention to it. I just set it down on the table and returned to putting our groceries away, already thinking about the piles of laundry waiting to be folded.
And here’s the thing about playdough that I’ve been saying since I first set foot in a preschool classroom a million years ago: it is one of the only materials that children still get to use completely on their own terms. No instructions or right answer. No finished product to aim for. Just dough and their hands and whatever story they decide to tell.
That’s not an accident. That’s by design.
Below: my favorite recipe, the ziplock storage trick that keeps it fresh for months, four ways to set it up so they’ll actually stay with it, and which accessories to keep and which to ditch.
Playdough is first. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be going one material at a time, bath toys, magnetic tiles, board games, art supplies, showing you how to use what you already have at home to get more independent play out of each one.
This is the week to start.
