Today we will play with playdough.

Doesn’t sound much for a 10 year old to be doing does it?

But I was thrilled.

Because playing with playdough was a self-directed activity, and Big managed it from beginning to end.

Still not sounding like much is it? But let’s take a look at the details.

First of all she excavated our playdough from the craft shelves, and discovered that it was a bit past its best. (Not sure whether you would describe what was growing on it as mould/fur or an alien infestation planning to take over the world :/ .) I commented that you can make playdough, so she googled for instructions and came up with a couple of recipes on instructables.

She went through the instructions and worked out what the list of ingredients are. Discovered that she would need food colouring and plain flour, neither of which we had in, so she got herself organised and went off to the coop with £5 in hand. Oh, and there was the discussion about which colours to buy – she went for red, blue and yellow on the principle that she’d be able to make purple, orange and green from those as well 🙂 .

Didn’t take her long over there, so once back they both headed for the kitchen and measured out the flour. This was the point when we realised we didn’t have a lot of salt, so they didn’t get to make a bit amount of playdough to start with, but that wasn’t such a bad idea for a first run anyway.

And once they’d made the playdough, they played with it for ages. *And* they washed up the bowls they’d used! 😉

So, in playing with playdough, Big did IT, planning, went out shopping independently, did some maths (both measuring and in working out whether she’d enough money to buy what she wanted), some science and probably a host of other stuff I’m not even noticing. Can we call the actual playing craft?

So, was playing with playdough a sufficient education for a morning? I rather thought it was.