A couple years ago I bought Emmett a small jar that included some dough and Christmas themed items. I wasn’t sure how long it would hold his attention and was pleasantly surprised when he played with it constantly. Since then, I have made various themed sensory dough jars (like the Bluey sensory jars for his birthday).
This year I am the room parent for Emmett’s preschool class and our first class activity is a Harvest Party. For this party, each class is doing either a game or craft/activity. Immediately I thought about making a fall themed sensory dough jar and make a couple activity mats for them to play with.
For the dough, I made my mom’s trusty kindergarten teacher dough. I used red and yellow food coloring to make it a great pumpkin orange color. I did confirm with his teachers that there were no gluten allergies in the class before making this project.
The fun part of making these sensory dough jars are finding the add-ins! While the party was going to be right around Halloween, I wanted to stick to a fall theme rather than a Halloween theme (the class is made of 3 and 4 year old kids). For a fall theme, I searched for items relating to pumpkins, leaves, acorns, and corn.
Fall Sensory Dough Jar Ingredients
For each jar, I rolled 3oz of dough into a ball as the base and then added a few of each item. I tried to make each jar as similar as possible while maintaining a variety of colors and type. With the number of jars I was making, I was able to add approximately 20 different add-ins per jar.
To make each activity mat, I headed to my handy-dandy tool of Canva. I couldn’t narrow down my ideas so I ended up with four different pages. I printed these designs double-sided on cardstock and then laminated the cardstock to give the activity sheets some longevity.
Emmett was very interested in everything I was doing while assembling these fall sensory dough jars and his classmates had so much fun playing with all the items during the class party! It was so interesting to see how they interacted with the different objects in addition to the dough and activity mats.
