Emotion Playdough Mats for Hands-On Learning Fun for Kids (10 Free)

Emotion playdough mats are fantastic ways to help your kids enjoy hands-on learning fun.

These free printable activities are awesome ways to provide your children with opportunities for building both fine motor skills AND emotional intelligence.

Find out more about these playdough mats (in both color and black-and-white) featuring feelings and get creative ideas for using with your kids.

Playdough Mats + Emotions = Amazing Learning Fun!

If you're looking for easy yet fun ways to help your kids learning more about feelings, you'll love these printable emotion playdough mats.

Hands-on activities make abstract concepts, like feelings, easier for kids to understand and apply to real-life situations plus gain greater emotional control.

When I worked as a mental health therapist with children (and with my own 5 boys), I frequently used hands-on tools, like stuffed animals, dolls, playdough and coloring activities, to open up conversation and teach lessons about emotional awareness and other social-emotional skills.

Activities with hands-on tools also are awesome for reinforcing lessons presented in books and videos 😊

Hands-on activities provide your kids something to focus on while chatting about different emotions and situations.

Bonus: Resources, like these emotion playdough emotions mats, are wonderful for building and encouraging growth mindset skills.You can pair with books about emotions to extend the learning fun!

Learn More About These Emotion Playdough Mats

This free printable pack of emotion playdough mats includes 20 pages (10 color and 10 black-and-white).

Your kids will learn about feelings through different facial expressions that look a lot like popular emojis. Each page includes:

• Name
• This face is...
• Facial expression
• Write the word ______ (the featured emotion) with dotted line

The emotions included in this printable set are:

• happy
• sad
• scared
• surprised
• shy
• loving
• frustrated
• angry
• nervous
• excited

Tips & Tricks for Making the Most of Your Fun with Playdough Mats

With this free pack of 15 free playdough face mats featuring emotions, I recommend that you take these steps to extend their use.

• You can laminate your printables OR use dry erase pockets (or page protector) so your kids can use these activities again and again!

• Use dry erase markers to draw unique and creative expressions

• Use those dry erase markers to practice copying feeling words

• Challenge your kids to think of different emotions - and create their own expressions on the back of the pages

• Use these emotion playdough mats as conversation starters or writing prompts for simple words, sentences, or have your kids tell you a story and you jot it down for them

Cool Ideas for Enjoying These Activities Featuring Feelings

You can use these free printable playdough mats in so many ways for teaching kids about various emotions and practicing fine motor skills!

With the mats in color, you can try to match your playdough to the colors on the feelings faces. Or get creative and use what you like or have.

With the black-and-white mats, feel free to use your imagination. Pick a variety of colors. Create a rainbow of playdough (my boys LOVE to do this!) and add.

You can place the playdough in your hands and roll back and forth to make "snakes" (that's what we've always called them). Or roll small balls.

Another idea is to place a large amount of playdough on the mat and use a rolling pin to flatten. Then, use a dull knife or other tool to "cut out" the pieces. Fun way for little hands to make these play dough faces!

Oh, and you can totally use the black-and-white playdough mats for coloring fun! Print out extra copies to color in the different faces.

Find examples of each face in movies, books, and other print materials. Compare the facial expressions. And make the faces with your kids!

Get Your Free Pack of Emotion Playdough Mats

High five! You're so close to getting and enjoying these playdough mats featuring feelings.

This FREE printables pack includes 20 pages (10 color and 10 black-and white) of emotions play dough mats.

Wow - that's a whole bunch of hands-on learning fun about emotions with playdough activities!

You can print as many copies of these playdough emotions activities as you need to enjoy with your homeschool, classroom, or co-op. If you have co-workers or friends who may like to use these free printables, please share this post (and not the download). Thanks so much for your cooperation and sharing!

To get these FREE Emotions Playdough Mats, all you need to do is subscribe to Rock Your Homeschool.

You’ll receive an email with a PDF file, along with a password to open the Subscriber’s Library to all RYHS freebies.

Plus, you’ll get emails with ideas, resources, and encouragement to make life and learning fun 🙂

(Psst! Current RYHS members just need to access the Subscriber Freebies page and enter the password in your welcome email.)

Get your Free Emotion Playdough Mats Pack by tapping here or on the image below.

Hope your kids (and you) enjoy tons of creative hands-on fun with these emotion playdough mats!

More Fun Ways to Boost Hands-On Learning Fun for Kids

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