Gingerbread Playdough Mats

· · · · · ·

Nothing screams “hands-on learning” quite like playdough mats. Maybe that’s why I love them so much!

If you’re in need of a festive holiday math center or just need to sharpen up students’ number skills, these gingerbread playdough mats are a must-try.

Grab your set below and then hop over to grab 13 more festive gingerbread centers your students will LOVE in our shop or on Teachers Pay Teachers!

Gingerbread Playdough Mats

Getting Ready

To prep the activity, I simply printed the playdough mats on cardstock to give them extra durability and slid them through the laminator so they could be reused over and over again.

Gingerbread Playdough Mats

Then I pulled out our batch of playdough and viola: we were ready to play!

Gingerbread Playdough Mats

My kids LOVE playdough so once they saw me pull out a few canisters, they were excited to jump in and play.

To start, I had them arrange the mats in a long line starting with the number zero and stretching to ten.

Then we talked about how there are different ways to make each number: we can write it, count it with our fingers, spell it with letters… even add that many buttons to a gingerbread man!

Since my kids were already familiar with the numbers, I let them pick any mat from the pile.

If I was working with younger children, however, I would have punched a hole in the upper left-hand corner of each one and then bound them together with a book ring so that students could practice the numbers in 123 order.

Each mat gave them lots of opportunities to practice.

Gingerbread Playdough Mats

They:

  • traced the number with their finger.
  • counted up to it with their fingers.
  • rolled out a matching number of playdough buttons and placed them on their gingerbread man.
  • named the letters and read the word out loud.
  • and then made playdough gumdrops to add to their ten frame!

Although I didn’t have them do it, students would have fun forming the number with playdough and laying it in the “trace” box too!

Snag Your Playdough Mats

Scroll down and click the blue download button below to grab your mats and then snag 13 more festive gingerbread centers your students will LOVE in our shop or on Teachers Pay Teachers!

Click here to subscribe

Similar Posts

7 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *