Play dough pizza parlour

Play dough is such a good material to use in pretend play. With a child’s imagination play dough can be turned into just about anything. It adds a extra sensory dimension into their play and really it’s not too messy to tidy up, so you can use it in the dolls house, play kitchen, home corner, train set, garden… wherever!

This week my girls have been having a fabulous fun time using play dough to make pizzas. Yesterday Janet Lansbury wrote that play is enough and I thought I’d show you how this works in our house. A simple batch of play dough plus a few added extras turns into hours of play with math, science, language and social skills incorporated naturally as part of the children’s play.

Play Dough Pizza Parlour

We started by making some play dough of course. We made our easy no cook play dough recipe for our pizza dough, adding in some herbs from the garden for extra sensory fragrance: rosemary and oregano are great pizza smells. We also made a batch of play dough with red food colouring in, which was to be the tomato sauce topping on our pizzas.

What children are learning about as they play: reading a recipe, measuring ingredients, counting, science: observing the properties of materials, sensory skills: smelling and feeling, types of plants in the garden, using a knife to chop: fine motor skills

Once the ingredients had combined it was time to knead the dough. This is such a comforting process, as the dough is still warm and each push and squash releases the fragrance from the herbs.

What children are learning about as they play: the principles of making bread, gross motor skills, developing finger strength and dexterity

Then it was time to make pizzas! We set out our restaurant kitchen on the table, with different stations: a place to take orders, boards where the children could roll out their pizza bases, a ‘toppings’ assortment and baking trays at the other end, so their pizzas could be taken off to bake in our toy cooker.

Items to offer the children as topping for their pizza could include:

:: pompoms :: bottle tops :: pasta pieces :: buttons :: marbles :: dried beans :: rice :: lentils :: fresh or dried herbs ::

You know your children so pick items to suit them ~ nothing small enough to swallow if you have young children playing

What children are learning about as they play: using imagination, thinking creatively, trying out a real life situation in play, co-operating with others, sharing, working as a team, counting, making choices and decisions, picking up small items: fine motor skills

Including chopped herbs in the dough and a variety of toppings to choose from introduces lots of interesting textures to the children’s play – so much more interesting than only playing with plastic toy food.

The addition of a telephone gave the game a whole new twist – people could ring in to place pizza orders! We worked together to make some Pizza Parlour order sheets, so the children could take notes of each order to pass to the pizza chefs. This brought new elements to the play: reading, writing and having telephone conversations. There was much excitement when I sneaked into the other room and called our home phone from my mobile to place a real order! {L whispered to B: It’s mummy in real life and she wants a pizza!}

What children are learning about they play: communication, real life situations: how do you answer the telephone /order a pizza, reading and writing, size comparisons: small, medium or large pizzas, how addresses and telephone numbers work, team work

So much lovely writing going on ~ and all with a very practical purpose in the play.

If you’d like a template of the sheet we used you can download one here.

Setting up a simple restaurant area completed our Play Dough Pizza parlour and gave the children another aspect to include in their play ~ with lots of conversations going on as they took care of their customers. The girls and I were recently invited to go and try out the new menus at Frankie and Benny’s - which they loved! – so lots of their play was based on the lovely waitress who look after them there.  And here’s their play dough ice cream sundae inspired by Frankie and Benny’s Knickerbocker Glory!

This post is part of our Play Dough Pledge week. Join in and Pledge to try a different way of playing with play dough with your kids.

My A-Z of Play Dough Recipes gives you a whole alphabet of play dough flavours to pick from.

And hop on over to join us on Facebook where we have all sorts of extra play dough ideas and chat going on.

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