Play dough is always a fun and engaging sensory experience for young children. You can easily add colors and scents to your play dough to make it even more inviting! This candy cane playdough activity is a fantastic way to engage the senses while developing fine motor skills and giving little learners a chance to exercise their creativity.
Kids love these open-ended play dough invitations, the possibilities are endless and you can incorporate them with whatever theme you’re working on. A candy cane play dough invitation is perfect for a gingerbread or holiday theme.
Candy Cane Playdough Exploration
While participating in this candy cane playdough activity, kids will engage their senses while developing fine motor skills. The texture of the dough, the smell of the peppermint, the bright colors, and the stark contrast between white and red. It’s all a great way to pull children into an activity and keep them engaged.
On top of that, play dough is an excellent way to develop those small hand muscles that kids will need to write and do a variety of other life skills.
Candy Cane Playdough Supplies
Here are the supplies you’ll need to make your own candy cane play dough.
- Red Play Dough (here’s my homemade playdough recipe)
- White Play Dough
- Candy Cane Cookie Cutters
- Chenille Stems (red, green and white)
- Optional: Peppermint Extract or Peppermint Essential Oil
- Any other play dough tools you wish to include (Here are some of our favorite play dough tools).
Start by making your favorite play dough recipe. You can add the peppermint extract or oil to the water when cooking the dough. A half a tablespoon should be plenty, but this may depend on the brand you use and your individual preferences. Now your dough will make your classroom smell amazing!
Check out this research-based, playful learning unit in our curriculum shop!
The Ultimate Pre-K Christmas Activities Bundle
19 of our most popular Christmas theme resources, including math, literacy, and dramatic play! Make learning fun with this hands-on bundle!
Then, divide your batch of play dough in half and color one half red using liquid watercolors or red food coloring. If you like brighter, more vibrant colors you will want to use liquid watercolors. When your dough is colored, you can twist the red and white dough together to create a candy cane effect.
Next, cut the chenille stems into pieces about a 1/2 inch long. The size of your stems will depend on the size of your cookie cutters.
Finally, place the play dough, chenille stem pieces, and cookie cutters on a tray.
Candy Cane Play Dough Activity
Invite your children to explore the materials on the tray and create candy canes. You can encourage them to roll snakes with each color of dough and twist them together to make candy canes. They can also use the cookie cutters and chenille stems provided.
They may even choose to make other things and that is totally fine, too.
Allow them to mix the colors and observe what happens to the dough colors over time.
What is most important is that they are developing those small hand muscles while using their creativity to make anything their imaginations can come up with!
Your kids will love this fun and festive play dough invitation for the holidays. In fact, this dough is so amazing you can even make it as a gift to give your kids!
Free Play Dough Essentials Guide
Looking for more playdough ideas? Simply fill out the form below to get our -FREE- Play Dough Essentials Guide filled with recipes (even gluten-free play dough!), activity ideas, and more.
More Christmas Ideas
Christmas Tree Sensory Bin Printable– Sensory bins are great ways to engage preschoolers in exploring and to build conceptual knowledge. This Christmas sensory bin builds pre-literacy skills. Children can find and match alphabet letters. They build visual discrimination skills, identifying the differences among letters. And they have so much fun digging in the bin to find the letters.
Five Senses Activities for Christmas – The five senses are key tools for preschoolers to explore and understand the world around them. When teachers can engage one or more of the senses, the learning experience becomes more concrete and more memorable. Here are over 20 activity ideas that will engage the senses as you invite preschoolers to learn more about Christmas.
Salt Dough Christmas Ornaments Kids Can Make- Salt dough ornaments are a classic Christmas craft, but they’re also tons of fun for kids and super easy to make. The best part? You probably already have the ingredients you need sitting in your pantry at home!
Printable Gingerbread House Recipe
You can get access to the free printable gingerbread house sequence cards below. Simply fill out the form and the printable will be emailed to you.
