Playdough Garden – Free Printable
Make a fun playdough garden with our free printable flowers, bees, bugs, and garden accessories. This easy playdough activity is quick to set up, and encourages creativity, fine motor skills, imagination and sensory play, and is always a hit with my pre-schoolers!
Ages:
2 years +
Learning Areas:
fine motor, sensory play
Set up:
easy, 5 mins
This playdough garden is one of the easiest invitation-to-play you can set up. Print the flowers and bugs, roll out playdough for “dirt” and “grass,” and let kids build their own garden. No special toys needed, no mess beyond the playdough itself, and it’s ready in minutes.
It’s also a fun and easy way to support a range of early learning skills. As children manipulate the playdough they strengthen the small hand muscles needed for writing and other fine motor tasks. Building garden scenes encourages creativity, imaginative play, storytelling, and problem-solving. And if you’re working on a spring or garden theme, it’s a natural fit for talking about flowers, insects, and how gardens grow.
What You Need
- Playdough
- The free printable playdough garden accessories (download below)
- Optional loose parts – sticks, leaves, buttons, gems etc.
That’s it. The printable does most of the work, so you don’t need flower-themed toys or figurines.
We used our homemade microwave playdough recipe and add some cocoa to make brown playdough for ‘dirt’ and added some food colouring to make green playdough. You could also use this fun recipe to make grass playdough!
How to Set Up a Playdough Garden
Print and cut out the playdough garden accessories. We recommend printing on cardstock and laminating them too they are easy to slide in and out of the playdough ‘dirt’.
Set up a tray or container with the garden accessories, loose parts and playdough and let the kids explore!
There is no one ‘right’ way to play with this open-ended activity. Let your kids use their imaginations to plant a flower garden, build bug homes, make up stories of who lives in the garden and more!
My preschool kids love to plant huge gardens of flowers then make the lady bugs and bees fly around pollinating each one!
Tips and Extension Ideas.
- Use lots of descriptive language as your children explore. Talk about the colours and shapes, the names of different flowers and insects.
- Count the number of flowers or bugs as your children add them to their garden.
- Talk and learn about what flowers need to grow – plant them in the playdough dirt, pretend to water them, and make playdough sun to shine on them.
- Talk and learn about the role bees and bugs play in the garden – use the insects to pollinate your flowers.
- Use songs and rhymes as part of playing – act out the ‘Ladybird Ladybird Fly Away Home’ rhyme, or the Bees in the Beehive finger play. What other songs do you know about flowers or insects?
Free Printable Playdough Garden Accessories
This set of free printable playdough garden accessories includes 2 pages of flowers, lady bugs, bees and grass, ready to print, cut and play with! We recommend printing them on cardstock and laminating them so they last.
This printable is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. It 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.
Download the Playdough Garden Accessories
Click here to download the garden accessories.
Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.
More Playdough Garden Fun!
If your kids love playdough as much as mine do, they’ll love our printable play dough mat and accessories sets in our shop!
Our Ocean Playdough Set has mermaids, sea creatures and more!
The Space Playdough Set has astronauts, aliens and lots of planets!
Our City Playdough Set is perfect for kids who love things with wheels!
That’s a brilliant idea. Mine are a little bit past playdough now but those would make fabulous templates for applique.
Can you be my mum, Kate? x
Sure… come on over… what’s one more??? LOL
I love your printables, what programs do you use to create them? My son’s into planets and space at the moment and I’m planning on making him some black play dough with glitter in the next few days – space printables would be awesome.
I use illustrator and photoshop mostly… oh and a pencil and paper! LOL
Oooh space things would be cool!
Oh this is a fantastic idea that I will have to try! I instantly thought it would be great to make a prehistoric swamp complete with dinosaurs. Aliens would be fun too.
Oh yes dinosaurs would be really cool!!
Thanks so much for sharing. Love this!
Fantastic, thanks, I have just discovered the joys of making our own play dough and can see these coming in really handy tomorrow!
Oh, aren’t they lovely! My girls will love these – thanks Kate!
Thank you for the idea and inspiration!
Oh wow, you dont know how perfect these will be for my Prep class. We are studying minibeasts next term and they will love using these with playdough in our play based curriculum!! Thankyou thankyou thankyou!!!
These were just too gorgeous for me not to feature them. Thanks so much for sharing them with everyone and for linking up to Tuesday Tots. :)
These are adorable! I will have to use your beautiful flowers as inspiration to make veggie garden for my son…flowers don’t interest him all that much!
Awesome stuff, thank you so much for sharing!
These are fantastic.
Just discovered your wonderful pickle world. Am in love!!
Am also thinking pink play dough with silver / pink glitter through it and princess, unicorn, carriage printables……
You rock!!
Thanks so much for the fabulous freebies – your generosity is sooooooo appreciated!
Hi, I’m going to use this idea in an arts and crafts class I do. Thank you! Just wondering what you put the playdough garden on? (for the kids to take it home). An old lid or tupperware or something? Thank you!
We just play with out play dough, not to create somthing to keep, but just to enjoy the process. Then we pack it all up so we can bring it all out again another day.
But if you wanted to keep your creation I think a tin lid or plastic lid would be a great way to do it, or even a piece of sturdy cardboard.
I’m new here….lovely site!! Can’t wait to reload my printer ink and get going with these!
Thanks for sharing, Kate! This is truly awesome! I’m very sure the kids will have a great time playing!
Where have you been all of my life? I needed you to defend my madness! I was the teacher who did not mind “messes”. I felt it was all part of the process. While other teachers cooked their playdough on the stove at home and brought it in the next day, I brought in an old coffee maker for hot water (plugged into an outlet in a storage closet with the closet door shut) and made the playdough right in the room with the class. I used unsweetened Kool Ade to color and scent the playdough. It went in as white powder and then…Magic…the color appeared! We used peg people, toy animals, toy cars and such IN the playdough. I know! I was a rebel! Simply Bonkers! My motto…a little soap and water and it cleans up like new. Clean up might take a bit longer and a bit of patience, but the class enjoyed the clean up as much as the mess up. Oh how I wish those teachers could see you now! Thank you for sharing my insanity! Blessings to You and Yours from Susie, Port Huron, Michigan, USA
This is a great idea. I’m just starting to experiment with making Playdough. How did you make brown Playdough? Or black Playdough for space?
We sometimes use paint to colour our play dough. You only need a little and it’s easy to mix up whatever colour you want before you add it to your dough. Make sure you use non-toxic paint and even that is probably not the best choice if you have little ones who like to snack on the play dough!
Hi, I’m new to your blog. I love these printables, can’t wait to print them out for my girls :)
I love the designs, really bright and funky for kids!