How to Create a Valentine’s Day Playdough Tray for Preschool

Your preschooler will love making sweet treats with playdough when you create this Valentine’s Day playdough tray. Continue reading to see how easy it is to make.

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When my kids, like many others, hear Valentine’s Day, they think of goodies. Chocolates, cookies, and other sweet treats.

Let’s use that interest to create a Sweet Treats Playdough Tray that is perfect not only for Valentine’s Day but the entire month of February!

Why Are Playdough Trays Useful for Preschoolers?

You may be wondering about the importance of playdough trays. Why use them with your preschooler? What benefits do they offer?

Many times parents of preschoolers only consider math and alphabet activities as educational. However, fine motor development is just as important, if not more so, for children around 2-6 years old. Playdough is one of the best tools to encourage this development in little ones.

Younger children’s hands are still developing, meaning many youngsters are not ready to be writing yet. They need hands-on activities that will strengthen these muscles so that when they are old enough to write, their fine motor function will be more developed.

Encouraging your children to strengthen hand muscles through fine motor activities, such as playdough, is a great way to help them write better as their bodies grow. These muscles are also very important as children learn to dress themselves, so having good fine motor strength is important at this age.

How to Create a Sweet Treats Playdough Tray for Preschoolers

It’s so simple to create a sweet treats playdough tray that is perfect for Valentine’s Day. You likely have many materials you need right at home, especially if you make homemade playdough. For this specific playdough tray, I used white and pink playdough. I also made brown playdough by adding some cocoa powder to my playdough recipe, which makes it smell chocolatey. I also found several additional choices of recipes for brown playdough, some using cocoa powder and another using food dye.

Materials Needed for Sweet Treats Valentine’s Day Playdough Tray

• Playdough, either store-bought or homemade: I used white, pink, and brown playdough in my tray.
• Tray or plate to hold playdough materials: I used a divided tray from the party supply section of the dollar store.
• Wooden beads in red, pink, and white; plastic beads; sequins; gems to “decorate” playdough sweet treats
• Cake pop baking sticks (You can find at local craft stores like Michael’s) and/or paper straws
• Pipe cleaners in white, silver, red, pink, or black to use instead of or with the cake pop baking sticks
• Playdough tools such as rollers and plastic scissors or knives
• Optional: Tray to work on

Set the materials on the divided tray or plate in an attractive design. I’ve found the more appealing I set up activities, the more likely they’ll be used. If your child won’t use this playdough tray right away, be sure to keep the playdough in an airtight container until ready for play. Otherwise, you can set the divided tray on a table. I also like to add a flat tray for my children to work on as well, but they could easily just work right on the table.

Tip: Try not to have expectations for how your child should use these materials. Leaving the activity open-ended will allow your child to develop their creativity skills as well as fine motor skills.

In our homeschool room, I keep a bookcase for my youngest full of hands-on learning materials. He knows he’s welcome to pull an activity off the shelf to use, then he puts it back when done. The shelf keeps activities easy for him to see and access so that I can focus on teaching my older boys without being interrupted.

Additional Valentine’s Day Activities

February is a fun month to add lots of Valentine’s Day-themed activities to your preschooler’s day. Here are some other activities that would fit in well with the Sweet Treats Playdough Tray.

• Valentine’s Day sensory bins are also a big hit with preschoolers and they’re also easy to set up.
• Add in math and literacy skills with these Valentine hearts cards to add to sensory bins for older preschoolers.
• Get out some construction paper, markers, and stickers so your little one can create Valentine’s Day cards for loved ones. The dollar store often has themed stampers that would be a fun addition to this writing center.
• Help your little one work on shape recognition with these fun Valentine’s chocolates task cards.

Go digging around your craft materials or write out a small shopping list so that your little one can soon be enjoying a sweet treats Valentine’s Day playdough tray. They’ll have lots of fun playing while you’ll know that they’re working on fine motor development, creativity skills, and more.