About Me

My name is Myia and I am a mom to two wonderful girls. We love to explore life through sensory/messy play and nature. I strongly believe that you need to let children "be little" to reach their full potential. We encourage mess and exploring to build our little one up. We learn through a mixture of Reggio/Waldrof/Montessori practices. Follow for ideas and experiences in sensory play as well as our attachment parent journey!

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Silly Putty Jewel Dig to encourage fine motor

I have a 15 year old brother who is developmentally delayed autistic, and it is from his therapy work I witnessed growing up I get a lot of my inspiration from. Lo and behold my excitement when I rediscovered a old favorite-Therapy putty. Therapy putty is much different than regular silly putty, and for only $14 on amazon quite worth the investment-however I couldn't make the purchase this paycheck! Too eager, I made a simple putty on the thicker version.

It is very simple: just use dish soap and corn starch. Some people swear Dawn makes a better putty, I would believe that as I personally think Dawn is the king of soaps for power cleaning, but I had dollar store soap that worked just as well. Note the color of the soap will be the color of your putty in pastel version. Many say to use a 1:1 ratio, I cannot for sure tell you my exact measurements. I simply poured 1 cup of cornstarch and squeezed in soap until I got the texture I wanted. 


Now, I put it in a container and let sit, and that was kinda a mistake. Two days later, it was more doughy than putty. But we took advantage of it, and played with dish soap dough!



Then after a while, I took a chance and decided to add more soap to see it would putty back up.


And sure enough it did! Like I said, this is a thicker putty than store bough which is what we needed. So I brought out the gems. 



The goal of any activity is to have fun, but it is special when a activity requires more manipulating fine motor gestures than normal, and this is exactly what this provides. Therapy putty does the same; it requires manipulation and hand strengthening coordination that helps children learn. 


We pressed down the gems, and then worked to get them out of the putty. This was of course just a lot of fun for Tegan. She also used a Popsicle stick to help pry them out. This was also a pretty easy activity to clean up, as I picked up the putty and crumbs that were left I wiped off with a wet rag-activating the soap so I could also say I cleaned off her table ;) 


Tegan loves doughs of all kinds, but this putty kept her busy for an hour with playing with the cut outs and them gems. Defiantly a hit. I am still going to order the Therapy putty and write a review on the difference between it and our homemade version, so stay tuned! 








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