S-T-A-M-P Do That Thang: Stamped Playdough

We've really been loving our color your own playdough and the last time we got it out to play, I asked mom if we could stamp it.  Mom loved this because we didn't end up with 5,000 sheets of paper each with one or two stamps on them -- all we had to do was ball it up and roll it out again for a new canvas.  And we found it was much easier to stamp clearly on the soft surface.  Sometimes we used ink and sometimes we just made impressions with the stamps.

The pirates inevitably came out to play, too.  And on our second day of stamping, we started drawing pirate faces on the dough and stretching them out into funny distortions.  Cam used the markers and stamps with her bakery tools to make a sweet little birthday cake.  We actually didn't have any birthday candles, so we used some toothpicks instead.  And we sang the "happy birthday" song over and over and over and over again.

What a Scene: Color Your Own Playdough Playscape

Earlier this week we posted about our passover playdough and showed how we made it look like matzah by coloring the playdough with a brown marker.  Well once mom said we could color playdough with markers, it was game on.  And it has been since then.  We've seriously asked to color the playdough four or five times since last weekend.  And each time it looks more and more like it's tie dyed.

And it was a great way to put together playscapes or scenes for our pirates.  We rolled it out, drew a deserted island and water and set our ships sailing.  When we were done with that, we balled it up, rolled it back out and started over.  We drew an interactive treasure map and literally buried treasure underneath it.  Then dug it up.  We made playdough cannon balls and shot them out of our cannons.  And on and on.  This has been the best canvas we've ever used for playing pretend.  I've spent hours with this playdough this week.  And even Cami has been more into it than usual.  She's still making "Joe Joe's," but she loves using the markers to do it.

I can't believe we haven't thought of this before, but we certainly plan on having a batch of plain playdough on hand in the future.  What playscape would you come up with?  If you need pirates, we have plenty.  Just saying.