Elevate your All About Me learning theme with a hands-on crafting sensory activity; the play dough self portraits. With its tactile benefits and endless possibilities, play dough serves as a splendid medium for fostering fine motor skills essential for young minds while nurturing imagination.
In this fun activity, your kids will be using a variety of materials to create self-portraits. While play dough plays an important part in this project, you can add a whole lot of other materials, especially recycled ones. This is perfect to use up all those bits and pieces from your other crafting activities.
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Making self-portraits is one of the more important art lessons in early education and we do love to offer you new ideas on how to tackle this subject.
Related: paper plate self portraits
This self portrait activity is perfect for younger ones, however, you will have to prepare the “blank canvas” for them.
How to Make the Play Dough Self Portraits
What you need:
These are just some of the materials you can use.
- pencil
- scissors
- glue
- yarn (we used yellow)
- play dough in various colors
- cardboard
- black marker
- crayons
Step-by-Step Tutorial
Prepare the base for the portraits. Make one for each student.
We recommend drawing the outline with a bold black marker.
Cut out the outline.
Each child will personalize their own. If you have scrap yarn, you can let the kids make hair out of it. An alternative (cheaper one) is to just use paper and you can have kids work on their scissors skills as well.
To make yarn hair, especially long har, cut strings of yarn and tie them at the middle.
Glue the hair on the portrait. Kids can use white school glue or a low temp glue gun.
To keep the long hair in place, also add glue on the sides.
Clothes are an important part of self-portraits. Have the kids color theirs with crayons.
It’s a play-dough fun time! Have the kids pick out play dough that matches their eye color.
Let’s make the eyes. They can be a single color or kids can layer them, it’s up to them.
They can add smaller circles inside the eyes.
And even add the tiny black ones for the pupils.
Why not add a pair of eyebrows?
Have them craft a charming smile by shaping the play dough into a mouth.
Lastly, have them shape a nose and press it against the cardboard, making it a bit 3D for that standout effect.
All done!
How did your kids like the self-portrait project?
This entire process is a fantastic way for kids to express how they see themselves.
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