Playdough for the little ones - the first steps in modeling

Introduce your baby to the clay in the year or a year and a half age. After all, modeling – this is a great opportunity to have fun and to spend time, and, in addition, develop fine motor skills, spatial thinking, imagination and fantasy! To toddler liked to sculpt, it is important to choose to practice only the highest quality and age-appropriate materials. So the play-DOH for the little ones should be soft, bright and not much sticks to the hands.  But most importantly – it needs to be absolutely safe, because children are very often pulled all into his mouth.

Starting sculpting lessons, we should not immediately try to teach a toddler to make "sausages" and "balls", and especially to try to master more complex shapes.  For starters it is better to offer a child modeling clay for the kids and allow him / her to consider and explore unfamiliar thing. Do not immediately give Chad all the cubes or jars-one or two colors will be enough for the first acquaintance. The child will be very interesting to crush magic plasticine in hands and observe how it changes shape. The mother should immediately prepare for the fact that after a fun lesson, most likely, you will need to wash your baby and scrub a clump of clay from the surface of the table and the floor, but the result, namely the happy face of a baby, his interest and burning eyes, that is! And in order to minimize subsequent cleaning, you should carefully organize the workplace, using special couplings. The floor under the chair can be covered with oilcloth or newspaper, which is especially important if the creative process takes place in a room with carpet on the floor.

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The Process or result

Often at toddler playdough for the kids, mom thinks that after a couple study sessions it will be possible go to serious lessons. In her dreams she is already making plans, how to teach a kid to sculpt those or other elementary figures, but in practice faced with the fact that the child is absolutely not interested in such “conscious” creativity (this is true for children in the first 2-3 years of life). Often the baby just sculpts something, and then watching what happened. For baby important is the process of modeling and not its result. So no need to force things, because the most important thing – to foster children's interest in modeling, but everything else will come with age and experience. Moreover, it is so exciting – trying to understand what happened in the end, and try to see if the subject of any recognizable features!

However, this does not mean you have to put the child at the table, give it a  soft clay and give to yourself, simply by observing his safety: suppose, he says, he understands the properties of objects and learning to work independently. Indeed, in this case the kid will lose interest in modeling already through one or two of these “classes”, while joint work with mom or dad (and older siblings) will help to instill a love for this exciting art!

Classes for kids

So the play-DOH for the little ones bought, the workplace is prepared – it's time to create! To interest the child, we should offer him an interesting and unusual gaming sessions. For example, in order to teach toddler to pinch off pieces of clay, you can play with him in chickens and chickens who really want to taste the beans and ask the child to help them. Baby will be interesting to detach from the brick of clay in small pieces and to treat their chickens (which you can just draw, cut from paper or use toys crumbs).

Also, many kids like to create “clay of an application’, perfect for a first acquaintance with the clay. Options can be mass: mom draws a cloud, and the kid casts her plasticine rain of pieces of the droplets, the mother draws the tree, and the baby is decorated with its leaves and fruits, mother draws a red mushroom, and the baby complements the white dots... For games you can use ready-made manuals and you can come up with and draw pictures on their own, than easily handle any adult. In addition to creating clay appliques, baby may like to smear the soft clay on a cardboard or dense paper – it is also a great way to get acquainted with the fascinating process of sculpting.

And most importantly – the child must see that the modeling of interest not only to him but also my mom. If moms are such classes are “heavy burden”, causing irritation and a desire to quickly “shoot” and end the lesson,  then the probability that the toddler will be interested in modeling, is sharply reduced. But if mom is happy doing with the baby (not matter how good it is), then the child is much more likely to love modeling!