Here’s a Halloween activity to try this spooky season – Halloween playdough! There are many playdough ideas, like finding Halloween critters, that can support your child’s speech and language development. Here you’ll find a Halloween playdough recipe to try this Halloween.

Making Halloween playdough offers many opportunities to introduce spooky vocabulary, concepts and speech sounds in a hands-on way. Playdough is a tactile and sensory experience of squishing, rolling and squeezing. If you’re looking for a range of speech and language ideas, find them in this related activity post: Linking Language to Playdough

Here’s a homemade playdough recipe without cream of tartar. It’s simple and easy to make in four steps. You can make this Halloween playdough recipe together with your preschooler. This playdough recipe can be reused once with a little splash of water.

Please note: When you introduce playdough to your little one is up to your discretion. I would not recommend it for under 2-year-olds. Always supervise your children while playing with playdough!

Pumpkin Spice Halloween Playdough Recipe

Time for the Playdough recipe! Here’s a pumpkin spice playdough recipe that can be perfect for the spooky season.

The Ingredients

What do you need:

• 2 cups of flour 
• 1/2 a cup of salt
• 2 tablespoons of oil
• 1-2 cup of warm water
• 2 tablespoons of lemon juice 
• 1/2 tablespoon of ground cinnamon 
• 1 tablespoon of ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon of nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon of mixed spice 
• A few drops of yellow and red food colouring

The Pumpkin Spice Playdough Recipe

1. Mix the flour, salt and spices in a bowl
2. Add in the oil, lemon juice and a few drops of orange food colouring
3. Add warm water little by little until you have the right consistency
4. Mix and knead until it’s all mixed in 

Modelling Language with Halloween Playdough

Following a Sequence

When making this Halloween playdough recipe, model step-by-step instructions. For example, ‘let’s mix the flour and salt’, ‘pour a little water’. Add some visuals to support your preschooler’s understanding and organisation of language. This can be done by using a visual sequence of the playdough recipe. Point to each step along the way with your spoken words. This helps your preschooler learn to sequence and organise information.

Recalling Sequences
At the end of the day, recall and remember the things you did. You can also do this after you’ve finished this Halloween activity. Include sequential language, like ‘first…, next…, and then…, and finally…’ For example, “first we mixed the flour. Next, we added oil and lemon juice, and then we added water. Finally, we mixed it together.”

Halloween Playdough Vocabulary

Introduce Halloween-themed words and concepts when playing with this pumpkin spice playdough. Here are some examples:

Playdough Ideas

Halloween is a perfect season to try these playdough ideas and support your preschooler’s speech and language development.

Pumpkin Faces

Once you’ve made your Halloween playdough, use these pumpkin cutters to create pumpkin faces. These can be happy faces, sad faces, spooky faces, scary faces or silly faces using playdough tools. While you’re making these faces, talk about different emotions and facial expressions. You can even try making the faces yourself!

Halloween Shape Cutters

Try using these Halloween shape cutters. Label and describe the creatures in this Halloween activity, like spiders, ghosts, witches, cats, haunted houses and cauldrons. Talk about what they look like, what they do, where you might find them and what feelings they create.

Creepy Crawlies

Try hiding Halloween critters in the pumpkin spice playdough. These can be spiders, bugs, vampire fangs, wolves, bats, and more. Support your preschooler’s speech and language development by asking them to find the items by their description. For example, “let’s find the one with 8 hairy legs”, “let’s find the one with wings”.

Haunted House Stories

These Halloween playdough ideas create many opportunities to make up spooky stories about haunted houses, evil witches or creepy skeletons. Create a haunted house together, and describe the characters, setting and problems they encounter. 

Related post: Playdough and story telling

Halloween Playdough and Spooky Words

Halloween is a superb season to model and practise s-cluster sounds. Here are a few to get you started:

These are some suggestions to support speech and language development in this Halloween activity. Remember to follow your child’s lead in the interaction and model language before, during and after play. Will you be making this Halloween playdough recipe this spooky season?