This is one of my favorite holiday therapy activities!  Cookie Cutter Playdough

I head down to my local dollar store and buy a bag full of holdiay cookie cutters (which ever holiday or season it may be at the time).  Above are my Christmas cookie cutters I bought a few years ago.  Below you will see pictures of my Halloween Cookie Cutter Activity but the premise is the same.

I use a small muffin tin (makes 6 muffins) and put a different color of play dough in each whole.  I either place the cookie cutter on top of the play dough (like the picture above)…or sometimes I use pictures of cookie cutter shape (so picture of a real bat, ghost, etc.) and place them over top of the play dough or in a bucket so the kids can pick which cookie cutter they will use “out of a hat”…fun to create anticipation that way.

First, we practice our stimulus cards (I usually try to practice 5-10 items or words in a row) then take a turns “making” our holiday shape with the playdough and cookie cutters.  If I get 10 practice trials between shapes that’s a total of 60 trials during this one activity!!!!

At the end of this activity we get to compare and count the shapes we made and talk about the colors we used to make those shapes (great PK vocabulary)!

And that is it!  Simple, fun, cheap, and motivating!  Don’t have your own cookie cutters?  Don’t worry…just head on down to your local dollar store and buy a bag (usually I get 5 or 6 cookie cutters for $1).