The Benefits of Play Dough Play!

     Rolling, squishing, pinching, and manipulating Play Dough has so many benefits for toddlers, preschoolers, and young children. In this post, I’m going to focus on two of those benefits: strengthening and bilateral skills.

     

Developing arm and hand strength is important for growing children, because they are needed for functional skills, such as self-help and fine motor activities. Grip strength and dexterity are needed for buttoning, writing, zipping, and other manipulation tasks. Bilateral skills are necessary for using both sides of the body together in a coordinated manner. This is also called bilateral integration, and it is an important for many activities that your child will carry out in home and at school. If a child has difficulty with bilateral coordination skills, they may end up using one hand alone rather than both hands together, which leads to challenges with certain activities, such as tying shoes, using a knife and fork, cutting with scissors, and buttoning.

     Play dough provide many opportunities to for a child to strengthen their arms and hands and improve bilateral integration. For example, while they are rolling, squeezing, flattening and shaping the dough, they are developing muscles in their little hands and learning to use them together in a coordinated manner!