Playdough has been a staple in my speech therapy bag for years. Here you’ll find playdough activities and ideas to support your child’s speech and language development.

Playdough can help with learning new words and phrases in a fun and motivating way. Particularly, if your child enjoys playdough activities. This squishy, mouldable material creates opportunities for sensory exploration and meaningful interactions. 

Try following your child’s lead to discover their interests and language that is meaningful to them. Find more information about child-led play in this related post: Child-Led Play

Pumpkin Spice Playdough Recipe

Find a pumpkin spice playdough recipe to make with your little one here.

Playdough Activities & Speech and Language Development

Explore some speech therapy ideas that you can embed into your routine at home. Meet your child at their language level and focus on modelling 1-2 ideas at a time.  

Vocabulary and Concepts

Support your child’s speech and language development by modelling some of these words in playdough activities.

Power Words

Power words are meaningful words that your child can use often and across contexts. They are beneficial in your child’s speech and language development. Here are some examples:

Related Post: The Magic of Power Words

Gestalt Language Learning & Playdough Activities

Gestalts are whole scripts or chunks of language. Gestalt language processors learn language in chunks and follow the Stages of Natural Language Acquisition. 

Here are some examples of comments or mitigable gestalts that could be modelled when engaging with playdough activities.

While these are examples of mitigable gestalts, they are not a ‘one size fits all’. Language should be based on your child’s interests and what’s useful for them. 

Story Telling Playdough Activities

Playdough can open the door to imaginative play and making up stories with your creations. You can create stories about faraway kingdoms, space or prehistoric times. 

Your child might prefer retelling a story from their favourite movie, TV show or book. You might find that they like retelling events and experiences. You can help them retell a birthday party, going shopping with Nan, or going on a holiday!

There are so many stories and events that you can share, and playdough can help with talking about these experiences. Storytelling is fundamental in your child’s speech and language development. If your child is not sure where to start, share some ideas and model different parts of a story. Here are the main elements of storytelling: 

1. Characters and People (Who?)

You could make the characters from your child’s favourite books, movies or TV shows using playdough. As you’re making the characters, describe and talk about them.

Here are some examples:

• “Elsa has long hair”
• “The T-Rex has sharp teeth”
• “Let’s make 2 eyes for Nan”
• “Bluey has a tail”

Talk about what your characters or the people in your story might want. For example, do they want food? Do they want to hide?

2. Setting (Where?)

Next, let’s think about the setting. You could make a place out of playdough, you could draw it or pretend that it’s there. Is it Elsa’s ice tower? A forest? A shop? Space? Or the beach?

There are many different locations where your story can take place. When you’re making and/or talking about these places, describe what they look and feel like.

Here are some examples:

• “Elsa’s tower is tall and cold”
• “Let’s make the sand. It was a hot day when we went to the beach”
• “The castle has a draw bridge that goes up and down” 
• “The rocket needs to be strong”

3. Time (When?)

Talk about when the story happened. You could talk about it happening right now, a “long time ago…”, on a particular day in the week (“On Saturday, we went to the beach”) or in the future. 

Be mindful of your child’s understanding of time. They may find it easier to understand the days of the week or months of the year. Concepts like “long ago” “yesterday” “in the future” and “tomorrow” are more abstract.

4. Sequence of Events (What happens next?)

Some stories may have a sequence of events. This is where you go to the shop, buy the food on your shopping list and drive back home. Can you and your child predict what might happen next? 

Other stories may have a problem. Your child may come up with the problem themselves or they may need some suggestions. Suggest some problems that could happen in your story and follow your child’s lead to see what happens next.

• “Nan couldn’t find the food she wanted at the shop” 
• “Elsa didn’t want to hurt people.” 
• “The rocket got stuck in space.”

Once you’ve talked about the problem in the story, think about some ways that you could solve it. Does Nan go to another shop? Who comes to help Elsa? What could you make to help the rocket get back to Earth?

5. Ending (How does your story end?)

You can talk about what happens at the end by sharing the characters’ feelings, thoughts and what they might say or do. How did Nan feel when they found the food? 

Here’s a visual template of the main parts of the story. You can use it to support your child’s speech and language development.

Get It Here

Speech Sounds & Playdough Activities

Playdough can provide a fantastic opportunity for your child to hear a particular speech sound they might find tricky. You can emphasize /sh/ at the end of a word by saying “push” or describe /p/ for “pull”.

Incorporating a speech sound in a fun and interactive way can help with reducing the pressure. It also makes it more meaningful, and supports generalisation of the sound to other contexts. 

Here are some suggestions for speech sounds at the beginning of words. Select 1-2 target words and model them during your playdough activities. 

This post was all about supporting your child’s speech and language development with playdough activities. Let’s roll a ball, pretend to bake some cupcakes, and enjoy the interaction with your child! 

Looking for more activity ideas?