Child Led Valentine's Playdough

I say child led, because JM completely did all of this on his own.  In general I consider our activities child led in that I follow his cues, but this was 100% his idea.  He pulled out the playdough.  He added all of the decorations.  It was amazing to watch him really let loose.  I loved watching the wheels turn in his head.  I am so thankful that I didn't stop his creativity.

The ironic part is that I intended to do some sort of Valentine's playdough.  I've seen brilliant ideas all over the internet for chocolate playdough, sparkly Valentine's playdough, Kool-Aid infused playdough for more sensory fun, and the list goes on and on.  I had settled on making chocolate playdough, but as I mentioned last week I opted to instead follow my boys' interest in OCEAN animals.

This week I kicked around the idea of making another new batch of playdough to do the chocolate idea, but I decided to hold off since we have a variety of colors already.  Enter JM:

Wednesday night is one of the highlights of my week.  Mike takes JZ to AWANA, so once the babies are in bed JM and I get one on one time.  As you can imagine, with four young children, one on one time is a rarity. After tucking in KO and KJ I asked JM what he wanted to do.  I made a few suggestions including painting, doing a puzzle, and reading.  He saw the heart cookie cutters on one of his trays and asked if he could play with them.  Of course I said yes, and before too long out came the playdough and some beads or "onions".

Next came some red glitter.  It was the "cheese".

"Mommy, don't touch it.  It needs to cook."

I'm not sure what the foam hearts represented, but they were squished in.  I'm assuming we were eating pizza, based on the cheese and onions and the fact that he constantly pressed everything down as flat as possible, but he never said.

 "Oh we need some purple."

 Of course the purple needs cheese on it too, right?

 And some corrugated paper scraps.

And yellow and white.

And pink and green.

The finishing touch was pipe cleaners shaped into hearts that had been on one of his trays earlier in the week. Funny that he wasn't interested in them then.

Don't you want a bite?

 Just because it's cute:

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