Numeracy News

Colleen Monaghan

Playdough

Did you know how many different maths skills you can develop using  playdough?

At a junior level:

Apart from the measurement skills, you can use playdough, for making long and short things, you can make heavy and light things too.  We can make balls to show amounts to 20, we can add balls of playdough, subtract balls and also show groups of balls of playdough - 2 groups of 3 balls makes 6.

At a middle level:

You can use playdough for developing the fraction and decimal concepts, make one whole length, then show one half, two halves.

What about making quarters? Can you divide your whole into four equal parts, we call these quarters? 

What if I cut the quarters in half? How many parts now? What do we call these?  Eighths!

Show me one quarter now add 2 quarters more, how much do you have now? We can use the playdough to make fractions to add, subtract and divide. 

At a senior level:

Playdough can be divided into tenths, representing one tenth show notation on 0.1 – one out 10 equal parts can be written as 0.1 one tenth. What if we divided each tenth into tenths again?  What would we have?  One hundredth - we record this 0.01 – one out of one hundredth parts. If we had two of these what we have? How might we record this?  0.02

Playdough recipe

Ingredients

1. 2 cups plain flour    
2. 1 cup salt
3. 1 tbs oil
4. 1 cup cold water
5. 2 drops liquid food colouring

Method

1. Combine plain flour and salt.
2. Add water, food colouring and oil. Mix until ingredients are combined.
3. Knead well.
4. If consistency is too wet add a little plain flour.