The Imagination Tree

Creative play and learning for kids

Chocolate Play Dough

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In all the lovely activities going on last week for Valentine’s Day, I saw that LOTS of people were making chocolate play dough. How delicious! I absolutely loved the brilliant idea over at Counting Coconuts of playing with the dough using a real chocolate box to make little sweets. Such fabulous imaginative play! 

 With the other half of the sand play dough we added half a cup of cocoa powder (instead of the sand and rice) and no food colouring. Kneading it was a delicious experience!

 And because I always like a bit of sparkle I squeezed in a big dollop of bronze glitter/ confetti glue (these confetti pen tubes are from ELC and are great.) For some reason I find glitter glue gives a better effect than ordinary glitter, and it looks fab in paint too!

 You can see the sheen from the glycerine in this photo. Lovely and silky smooth to mould and felt like fudge. Yum.

 Like in the original idea, I gave her a real chocolate box to play with and it was one of the best play dough creative sessions ever! She absolutely loved the idea of making little chocolates and instantly starting trying to squeeze the dough into small enough shapes to fit in the holes.

 I moulded lots of them for her to use and she started to point out different shapes and to realise that it needed to be the correct shape to fit the hole.

 She put them all in, asking for more where there weren’t enough, and then started to spontaneously count them all by pointing at them. At some point she began to get each chocolate to “talk” to each other and took them on little journeys around the house in the pockets of the oven gloves.

🙂

This is one of those activities that I wish I had done at school. It is SO good for a number of reasons and can be adapted for use with older children too.

This activity is good for:
* counting using 1:1 correspondence, ordering, identifying and making shapes (2D and 3D)
*  fine motor skills
* tactile/ sensory play
* extending vocabulary
* imaginary and creative play


Older children could: Make the dough following a pictorial recipe, mould all the chocolates into the correct shapes, estimate how many are in the box, write a chocolate box index card and invent new fillings, package these up as a gift, use the internet to find out how where chocolate comes from and how confectionary chocolates are made, make a chocolate box in a different shape and decorate it.

Comments

  5. Anna @ The Imagination Tree says

    Hi Rachel, I’ve just looked at that link and that’s not them (although I’m liking the look of those, thanks!) They are actually called “confetti pens”. I have looked them up and will put a proper link to them back in the original post as it won’t work here. Hope that helps. They are only £2.40 too, so a bargain! Think I might order some more 🙂

  6. Cathy James says

    We have a similar tray and I’m taking it into creche on Monday – thanks for the idea! The play dough table is always first stop for lots of them and I think they’ll love this.