Porridge Oats Playdough!

 In keeping with our theme about Goldilocks and the Three Bears this week, we made some play dough with porridge oats for some wonderful imaginative play, role play and sensory play. That’s a lot of play!

 Recipe for porridge playdough:
* 2 cups plain flour
* 1 cup salt
* 2 tablespoons oil
* 2 tablespoons cream of tartar
* 2 cups of *boiling* water
* 1-2 cups of porridge oats (oatmeal)

 Method:
* Mix in the dry ingredients
* Add the oil and stir through
* Add the cups of boiling water, one at a time, stirring vigorously between each cup
* When cool enough, tip it onto a surface and knead it until it stops being sticky
* Add the porridge oats, as many as are required to make the desired consistency
* Give your child an extra tub of oats to add during play

 The result is a wonderfully textured dough that looks remarkably edible (beware little ones!) It is salty enough to hopefully put them off after one bite, and is completely harmless anyway.

 We laid out some bowls, spoons and pans and the girls got busy rolling, kneading and cooking up some porridge in their pots for the three hungry bears.

 Our little friend came to play and enjoyed himself too, filling up an ice cube tray with porridge oat balls and sprinkling with an extra topping of oats. Yum!

 We found a bear cutter to go along with the activity to make some lovely textured bears from!

This goes well with our 5 a day book choice this week, with this story being our favourite of the 5.

Learning Links:
* Sensory: discovering new textures, investigating dry, soft, sticky
* Fine motor skills: kneading, rolling, flattening, pinching etc to build small hand muscles
* Literacy: retelling stories using props, retelling stories from memory with the key elements in the right order, understanding key characters and events in traditional tales
* Maths: following recipes by counting out cups, discussing volume and capacity
*Creativity: using props to represent other items in role play/ imaginative play