Play Dough Cutlery Skills

This is a very simple but fun activity, that can be done at home, to help develop the skills needed to use a knife and fork. M is starting school in September and one of the things randomly mentioned at the parents’ welcome meeting was that all the children should be using a knife and fork at lunchtime. I was slightly worried. M rarely, if ever uses a knife at mealtime. So we need to get practicing.

Set Up

This is super easy to get ready. Play dough (Amazon), cutlery and it’s ready to go. I added the sticky notes with numbers on, so that M could chop the play dough into the correct number of pieces. This would be a good activity to practice number recognition and one to one correspondence. I rolled the play dough into snakes so that there was some play dough ready to chop, especially for F.

Both were keen to use the cutlery. M cut one of her snakes into small chunks straight away. F did attempt to use the knife and fork together but found it tricky. So she then turned to her favourite play dough past time; asking Mummy to roll her balls of playdough for her to squash.

F then took some of the different coloured playdoughs and squashed one on top of the other. It looked very much like a flower. So M decided to create her own flower. F had been watching M and the way M used her knife, so F gave it another go and was surprisingly successful. This was a great activity for working on my toddlers’ motor skills and it was so easy to set up. They had lots of fun learning through their play.