Emotions Playdough Mats

Description

These emotions playdough mats were designed to support your child’s social-emotional development, providing a framework for learning about emotions in a fun way! 

Learning about emotions and giving children the language to identify and express emotions, is vital if we want to nurture emotional intelligence (EQ). EQ is the ability to understand and manage the emotions of ourselves and others. And research tells us it is even more important to the future success of our kids than IQ. If we want to raise kind, compassionate, and resilient kids, we MUST give them skills for understanding and managing emotions.

Why Playdough?

Play dough is such a great learning tool! It helps young children develop fine motor skills and strengthen their hand muscles. But it also provides lots of sensory input that helps with self regulation – through proprioception, touch, and even smell. Using play dough can be a very calming activity for young children – it’s a great tool to keep in a calm down space or kit.

Playdough also provides lots of open-ended play opportunities. Opportunities that promote creativity, imagination, development of social-emotional skills, and even language development!

What’s included with your playdough mats?

• A set of 16 emotions cards in full colour
• A set of 12 faces playdough mats with a range of skin and hair colours
• A set of questions to ask your child to encourage further learning and exploration during play

Using your Emotions Playdough Mats:

To use your emotions playdough mats, print and cut out your emotions cards and then select the mats that your child feels best represents them. There are a range of skin tones and hair colours available for your child to choose from. I recommend laminating your mats to keep them safe and help them last longer. 

And then it’s time to play!

You might like to select a card from the emotions deck and then ask your child to recreate the face with their play dough and mat. Or you can have your child choose a card that matches how they are feeling, and then write it on the mat after they’ve made their face. You may even like to play a matching game with your child, trying to match the play dough face with the appropriate feeling card.

For more information on the role of labelling emotions in emotional regulation, see this blog post here.

And find our whole range of emotions resources here.

You can even grab the complete set of 5 resources in this amazing value bundle – 5 printables for the price of 3!