Grow a Garden with Play Dough Flowers

We love making these play dough flowers with paper clips, paper flowers, and rocks. It’s such a fun fine motor activity that kids absolutely love, and so do I as an occupational therapist who loves easy and simple fine motor activities that build skills through play.

Play Dough Flowers with paper clips and rocks

I started by making a bunch of flowers.  I used my circle paper punches and glued circles together to make flowers.

Baby Girl and I stuck them onto green paper clips.  It was a great way to get started on the fine motor work in this activity.  She was really focused on putting the paperclips onto the flowers.

Fine Motor Activity for Kids

We tried clay and play dough for this activity.  The clay was more resistive to press the paper clips into, and a better strengthening tool…but it seemed to stick more to the paper clips.  Play dough worked better for us, and was just as good a fine motor strengthening work out. 

Pressing the paper clips into the play dough is a great way to encourage a tripod grasp while strengthening the intrinsic muscles of the hands.  The small muscles within the hand are so important for arch support and control in many fine motor tasks (coloring, zippering, buttoning…)

We’ve done another paper clips and play dough color match activity recently that hit on the fine motor work in this activity.  Check it out…your little play dough fan will love it!

This was a fun way to pretend and play as we grew our little garden!

More play dough ideas you may like:

Colleen Beck, OTR/L has been an occupational therapist since 2000, working in school-based, hand therapy, outpatient peds, EI, and SNF. Colleen created The OT Toolbox to inspire therapists, teachers, and parents with easy and fun tools to help children thrive. Read her story about going from an OT making $3/hour (after paying for kids’ childcare) to a full-time OT resource creator for millions of readers. Want to collaborate? Send an email to contact@theottoolbox.com.