We love our playdough.  We have used it in a number of fun ways – making animal footprints, forming letters, hiding beads and our latest craze has been making playdough cupcakes.

So now that we have 2 very large homeschooling bookcases our small white one was empty and looking rather sad so I thought we would use it to create a playdough area.

On the bottom I collected our tubs of playdough and our million cutters and shapes and goodies but I wanted to add something new for the kids.  I recently downloaded the Sharing a shell Platinum resource pack from Twinkl (we have not used it yet but it looks amasing) and in the pack there where some playdough mats.  So Monday night I cut and laminated them and added them to the middle shelf for the kids to discover.  Blue was the first to notice the mats and asked what he had to do.  So we got out our Sharing a Shell book and looked at the pictures in the book and pictures on the mat and spoke about what was missing.  Pink quickly thought this sounded interesting and joined us.  They both started off using the playdough to finish the pictures but then pink got her whiteboard markers out to add some extra details and Blue loved that idea.

So now our playdough mats are really playdough / white board marker mats.

The kids really enjoyed these mats so I did a quick search of Twinkl’s website and I found a bunch of great FREE playdough mats.  I have already bookmarked these three for later.

Mini Beast Playdough Mats

Transport Playdough Mats

Jungle and Rainforest Playdough Mats

They also have some great looking number playdough mats  and I found some doubling and halving playdough mats which I thought looked interesting but these ones are part of the gold package.  I have a feeling our playdough area is going to be around for some time.