Bumble Bee Playdough Activity for Kids + Our Favorite Bee Book {Playdough Recipe Included}

Our four year old has been so scared of bees lately that I decided it was time to learn a little bit more about them and hopefully diminish or eliminate her fear. So, I put together a fun bumble bee themed playdough activity and found the most adorable and educational book on bees. My thought was that if she spent time learning about bees and making playdough bees, maybe she wouldn’t be so frightened by them. Any excuse to make a new batch of playdough and have story time, right? 🙂 Read on to see all the fun we had learning about bees!

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What You’ll Need

Playdough (find our one-pot family recipe here)

Food coloring

Bee cookie cutter set (this is one of our favorite brands!)

The Life and Times of the Honeybee book

Pipe-cleaners (black)

Googly eyes

Mini rolling pin

Plastic play knife

Divided tray

What to Do

Begin by making a batch or two (we typically make one batch per child) of our one-pot playdough. This is our tried and true recipe that is super easy to make. However, if you’re not up to making homemade playdough this time around, store bought playdough will work just fine too! After you’ve made your playdough, allow it to cool a few minutes and then carefully plop it onto a sheet of parchment paper. Allow it to cool several more minutes. While it cools, you can take out your additional supplies needed for the activity and place them in your divided tray.

Once your playdough has cooled enough to handle, simply make a bit of an indentation in your playdough, add some food coloring in the middle of your playdough, and fold your playdough over and over until the coloring has been incorporated. We typically wear disposable gloves while coloring playdough, just to keep our hands from coming out rainbow colored, but if you don’t have any on hand, you could always place the playdough (along with the food coloring that you’ve just added) on a piece of plastic wrap and use the plastic wrap as a sort of shield while you fold the food coloring into the playdough.

Once your playdough has been colored, place it into your divided tray, along with the other materials, and invite your child to play.

We included our new favorite bee book as well.

The children had so much fun rolling out their playdough and using their cookie cutters to make bumble bees, hives, and flowers. Even the baby (13 months) had fun using the mini rolling pin.

Aren’t these just the most adorable cookie cutters? It’s fairly safe to say that our cookie cutters see a lot more playdough than cookie dough. 🙂

After making bee themed playdough cutouts, Miss L made bee cupcakes (we do love our baking too!).

Next on the agenda – playdough bees with pipe-cleaner and googly eyes! Aren’t they cute? We had a lot of fun with this playdough theme.

We also learned quite a bit about bees from our book about bees: The Life and Times of the Honeybee. For example, did you know that there are three types of bees and that the drone bees are so lazy that the worker bees often have to feed them? This book was full of fascinating information and beautiful illustrations. We definitely recommend adding this to your bookshelf.

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What is your favorite fact about bees? Let us know in the comment section below.

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Want more? Be sure to check out some of our other fun activities:

• Lemon playdough recipe
• Ladybug cutting and pasting craft (with free printable)
• Chocolate dipped animal crackers with sprinkles