Queen of Hearts jam tart play dough recipe

We took our favourite play dough recipe and transformed it into some fun messy play, making jam tarts for the Queen of Hearts in our Valentine bakery.

Jam tart play dough recipe

We made some dough using our favourite easy play dough recipe adding in almond essence to the plain batch to get a great pastry dough, and red food colouring to another batch to make our jam tart fillings. Then I set out some bakery equipment for the children to use in their play: rolling pins, cookie cutters, silicone cake cases and muffin tins.

I’m using every opportunity to add in words to our play and this written invitation gave the children a little reading practice – it’s quite exciting to  get a note from the queen! {Click the photo below and you can print the invitation}

I also gave them a set of bakery order sheets along with some pencils – red and pink of course – so they would write down their orders. {Click the image below if you’d like to print some sheets too}

Adding in these extra little elements is a fun and gentle way to encourage the children to read, write and explore maths as they play. It shows them that these ‘school’ skills have real and practical importance in life.

Providing a variety of cookie cutters is a very easy way to include a maths lesson in their play, letting them explore shape and size. They worked out they needed a big cookie cutter for the base of their jam tarts, and a small one if they wanted to make a lid.

They practised using a rolling pin…

and created a menu of imaginary cakes, pies and biscuits.

 Of course, they’re chatting all the time they play, pretending to take orders and work out recipes.

And the addition of some favourite small world characters gave them plenty of customers to serve.

 Even slicing the cakes into fair shares is a playful way to work on fractions. Of course, then children don’t know this was a maths lesson – they just though it was super fun!

 If your children love play dough take a look at this collection of play dough flavours and you can make some wonderful play dough recipes for your bakery. Or find some different play dough ideas on my Pinterest Play Dough board

And for more valentine-themed activities, see our top ten Valentine crafts for kids.

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