After my blog post The Science Behind Play dough… I ended my post saying that I would be evaluating my play dough experiment. I took everything to my lecture in containers and the student I worked with seemed to really enjoy making the play dough and gave lots of positive feedback about my experiment. Everything went to plan and it was really easy to make and the recipe was perfect. One thing that I would add is colour to the play dough. Adding colour makes this activity more fun for children and if you are going to use it within a theme can match up – for example making it orange and black at Halloween.

 

Whilst carrying out the experiment, as well as following the instructions, one of the discussions that we had was what age group this experiment could be done with. Through my experience I have always (wrongly I hold my hands up!) assumed that play dough is something that younger children mainly have an interest in by middle primary school age they don’t want to play. I even said this in my Science behind Playdough post writing “Each year group is different and obviously nursery aged children and P7’s will have different reasons for playing with play dough in class and speaking from experience the older children are the less interested they are in play dough and the more interested they are in Play stations.” Furthermore, it was mentioned in our discussion that actually there are many children who like making things out of clay and there is not a huge difference between clay and salt dough which you can leave to dry and become hard naturally or put in the oven. Plasticine is something else. Remember Morph?

And Wallace and Gromit are made out of plasticine?

They were some of my favourite things to watch as a child. So my initial thought that this would be a science experiment mainly aimed for younger children was completely abolished. Especially when I took the play dough we made home and I had 5 19-21 year old boys playing with it at the kitchen table…

 

 

 

I guess play dough really is for everyone…