Planting A Bean Play Dough Mat

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Play dough is such a fabulously fun activity. My kids love exploring with it so much that they have no idea when there are learning and developmental aspects to the activity.

Play dough is more than just squishing dough and creating things. It can be the base of many different activities, just like with this gardening activity. These play dough mats are used to help show children what happens to a seed as it is planted.

Growing A Seed Play Dough Activity

These play dough mats help children see the process that a seed goes through as it is planted. For this activity we used a bean. We chose this because you can plant the bean or eat it. At the end of this activity, this is an important aspect for kids to learn.

Including the aspect of play dough and the play dough mats helps increase sensory in children’s lives. Play dough is also fabulous for strengthening fine motor skills too.

This activity is super simple to set up. We have provided all the printables that you will need. Prepping these is simple, only needing scissors and either lamination or a reuseable bag.

Using a reusable bag is a simple alternative for laminating. It will keep the paper safe from play dough sticking to it, with much less cost.

Once you have prepped the printables, grab play dough and get growing.

There are 8 task cards. These will help children understand what the next step is, and what should be created with the play dough. These numbered task cards also explain what the seed is doing.

You may also like our Tree Root Craft.

The task cards include:

Planting the seed
The seed sprouting
Roots forming
Leaves forming
Blossoms forming
Vegetable forming

There is also a sun and rain/watering task card too, since these are obviously crucial.

You can see the colors of play dough that we used, but the colors are not what is important. Kids can use whichever colors they prefer.

This is such a fun, hands on and visual way for children to see the whole process of the cycle of a seed.

Complete your Garden Unit with the other activities in this series: