These garden playdough mats are perfect for spring or for kids who love the garden!
These three free printable garden playdough mats are a great sensory and fine motor activity that encourages lots of creative thinking with their open-ended designs! They make a great activity for a spring or a gardening learning theme and they are ready to print and go!
My kids love gardening. There are lots of great, easy veggies to grow with kids, and fun things to do in the garden, but some days it’s really not gardening weather. For those days when you can’t get outside into a real garden, these free printable garden playdough mats are a great alternative!
It’s easy to grow a garden with these garden playdough mats!
Here’s a fun new playdough recipe to try!
How are our Playdough Mats Different?
You may notice that Picklebums playdough mats are a little different to other playdough mats you might find online.
Our playdough mats are designed to be ‘open-ended’ to encourage your child’s creative thinking and imagination. This also encourages your child to engage more deeply with the activity, holding their attention for longer and allowing lots more learning opportunities.
Each playdough mat has a simple image and a question that is designed as a prompt. There are no right or wrong way to create with these play dough mats, so if your kids wan’t to plant snakes in their garden that’s fine, and if your tree has candy growing on it, that’s awesome! It’s all about creativity and fun!
Materials You’ll Need for this Garden Playdough Activity.
We used our lovely soft microwave play dough with our garden play dough mats, and a collection of loose parts and accessories.
Here are some of the loose parts and accessories you could use with these garden playdough mats:
- Large Sequins (we like these leaf sequins)
- Straws, cut up
- Plastic gems
- Glass pebbles
- Beads
- Twigs
- Real leaves from the garden
- Buttons
We use a regular desktop inkjet printer to print our play dough mats. I print onto regular printer paper and then laminate each one. If you want to save on laminating pockets, laminate two sheets together, back to back. You could also slip them in a page protector, or use write and wipe pockets.
Free Printable Garden Playdough Mats
There are three fun, open-ended, playdough templates in this garden playdough mat set – some plant pots to fill, a garden bed to plant, and a bare tree to fill.
These printable playdough mats are A4 sized pdf files, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open them. They will fit to print on US ‘letter sized’ paper, just be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options to allow for printer margins.
Click on the link below each playdough mat to download the printable.
Flower Pot Playdough Mat
What is growing in your pots?
Will your pots be filled with playdough flowers, plants, or perhaps you have something magical growing in your plant pots?
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
Garden Playdough Mat
What is growing in your garden bed?
What plants will you plant in your playdough garden? Which plants grow above the soil and which grow below it?
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
Tree Playdough Mat
What is growing on your tree?
Will your playdough tree have lots of green leaves or maybe some fruit? What season is your tree in, perhaps it is full of spring blossoms, or covered in snow?
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
These fun garden playdough mats also work great with dry erase markers or crayons, or print them in black and white on plain paper and use them as drawing prompts!
More Playdough Mats
When you are finished planting your play dough garden, you might like some of our other free printable play dough mats.
If you love my free playdough mats and would like to support my small business, you might like to check out some of my playdough sets in my shop.
Thanks for these Kate, once again you’ve come up with a fantastic activity that Ez is bound to love.
I hope you enjoy them as much as we have!
Oh my goodness, these are BRILLIANT! SO great for all ages too.
That’s the best thing about play dough… even my ten year olds still love it!
These are great Kate! I’ll be printing these off for my playgroup at Kids Like Us.
I hope you enjoy them as much as we have! If you have any ideas for more play dough mats please let me know!
Love your play doh mats. I print them and let the children color them in. Please make more.
Animals, School work etc.
Love these! Will have to print out some for my Noah. Thank you queen of printables :D x
You are most welcome!!
We are doing them right now – starting NSW school holidays with some play dough fun for 4.5 and 2.5 yr olds (and visiting Grandma). I can’t get enough of your play dough mats Kate – thanks for helping to prompt creativity in this household.
So lovely to hear that you are enjoying them! Feel free to let me know if you have any other ideas for play dough mats… there will definitely be more in the future!
Do you have to laminate these? OR do they work just printed on normal paper? Thanks
Yes, as I said above, you can laminate them or cover them in self adhesive plastic for using with play dough, or dry erase markers/crayons or you can print them on plain paper (colour or black and white) as drawing prompts.
Thanks so much for these! We used them in our classroom last week for “national Playdoh day” and our kids LOVED them! :)
Can’t wait to see what you come up with next!
These are great, thanks so much :)
So cute!
I love them! :D
Thanks for sharing, it’s very helpful, really! I’ll try it with my students.
I’m pinning it too!
Thank you!!!
Love the playdoh printables they are so diverse and can extend play to so many areas the children will love them carnt wait to see what they come up with and the garden ones are exactly what I’ve been looking for for such a long time thank you .
These are fantastic! I hope you’ll make more – perhaps under-the-sea and zoo themes? Thank you!
These are such wonderful printables, I am so excited to have found them on your site. Thank you for making them available to families.
Erin
Thank you for your wonderful generosity and brillants ideas.
Oh, thank you so much!
These mats are perfect …. simple but effective AND cheap to print out!