These garden playdough mats are perfect for garden loving kids!
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.
We wanted to go and do some gardening today, but it has been rainy and cold here, and the veggie garden is a muddy mess. So we made play dough gardens instead with these fun, free printable, garden play dough mats!.
Instead of being cold and wet outside in the real garden, with a few lumps of play dough, and some accessories, we were soon busy in our play dough garden.
It’s easy to grow a garden with these garden playdough mats!
Here’s a fun new playdough recipe to try!
Garden Play Dough Mats
There are three fun play dough mats in this garden play dough mat set.
Each has a simple image and a question which is designed to encourage creativity and imagination. 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!
We used our lovely soft microwave play dough with our garden play dough mats, and a collection of loose parts and accessories.
I’ve shared some affiliate links below to similar items, but most of these things can be picked up at your local craft or dollar store, or just use whatever you have on hand.
Here are the things we used for our garden play dough mats:
- Sequins (similar to these leaf sequins)
- Straws, cut up
- Plastic gems (similar to these plastic gems )
- Glass pebbles (similar to these glass pebbles)
- Beads
- Twigs
- Real leaves from the garden
First we planted a few things in pots…
Did you know you can grow play dough carrots in a pot?
You can download the ‘What’s growing in your pots?’ play dough mat here.
Then we planted a few things in a garden bed…
There was even a worm wriggling around under the soil!
You can download the ‘What is growing in your garden bed?’ play dough mat here.
And last of all we made some gorgeous leaves sprout on a big tree…
There are sequin blossoms on our tree too, just like the trees in our orchard right now.
You can download the ‘What is growing on your tree?’ play dough mat here.
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
You can make your own play dough garden, just print out the play dough mats and laminate them. They 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.
I 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.
More Play Dough 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 .
i’m unable to open or locate the garden and growing playdough mats. might you have a document you could email to me? they are wonderful! thank you
I’m sorry you are having problems…
Under the image of each play dough mat is a line that says ‘you can download the ‘x’ play dough mat here’ – click on that link and it should automatically open the pdf document in a new browser window.
If that doesn’t work you can right click on the link and choose ‘save as’ and download and save the pdf file that way.
You will also need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat (which is free to download) to open the file.
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!