Little Blue Truck Play Dough Kit

Two of my favourite things?  Kid’s books and play dough kits…  So a book-inspired play dough kit??  Oh my gosh…  A match made in heaven!!  We made this Little Blue Truck play dough kit last year when all of the Little Blue Truck books were on heavy rotation in our house and it was such a hit.

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For the purpose of the kit, we decided to use the original Little Blue Truck as our inspiration, but they’re all so good {well, with the exception of the spring one – it’s not my favourite if I’m being honest}.  They’re just such fun books to read aloud…  They have great rhythm and rhyme and they have really sweet messages behind them too – win!  I’d highly recommend all of these:

Little Blue Truck

Little Blue Truck Leads the Way

Little Blue Truck’s Halloween

Little Blue Truck’s Christmas

There’s also a new one on the way, Goodnight, Little Blue Truck, that I’m super excited to get my hands on.

While I wasn’t sure what colours of play dough we’d do for this kit, a few flips through the pages of the book and it was settled.  We’d go with rich, fall colours just like the ones in the illustrations.

Here’s a look…  We did a deep, brick red, a charcoal grey, a mustardy yellow, a coppery brown, and a mossy green.  Of course you could switch these up and do any colours you and your little one like though!

To make the play dough, I actually did 5 separate batches of dough (one for each colour) and then split each batch in half to make two kits – one for us to keep and one for us to gift.   Depending on how full I want our kit to be, I usually do two or three batches of play dough, so 5 batches split in half gave us the perfect amount.   You can find our go-to play dough recipe, as well as our tips and tricks to making the perfect play dough, here.  For this particular kit, we skipped the scent and used our favourite Wilton gel colours.

Here’s how the dough fit into our go-to play dough kit container, the GLIS divided box from Ikea {US | CAN}. (One thing to note is that while these dough balls are not wrapped in anything, the GLIS containers are not airtight, so I do gently place the dough into a large zip-close bag and then back into the container both for gifting and for personal storage.  In an air-tight bag, this play dough will last for months and months, whereas if you just leave them loose in the kit, you’ll notice them drying out and becoming sort of crystal-y fairly quickly.}

Next, we gathered up our animals and vehicles…  We already had all of the animals in the story in our collection of Schliech and PAPO figurines, so that’s what we went with. You can find them here:

• goat
• horse
• cow
• pig
• chicken
• chicks
• sheep
• duck (this is a goose, but it looked more like the duck in the book than our duck figure did)
• toad (ours is a green tree frog by Safari Ltd. that I can’t seem to find on amazon)

These figurines are beautiful quality and while we’ve built our collection slowly over many years, they’re definitely more pricey than others.  If you’re giving this as a gift and you’d like it to be more affordable, I would recommend going with Safari Ltd. or Wild Republic figurines…  Or even the ‘no name’ ones available in big toy stores and dollar stores.  You should be able to find all of the story characters and more, at a fraction of the cost.

{One other thing to note is that while I always use amazon links in my posts as those seem to be the most universally accessible for most, we buy almost all of our figurines from our very favourite toy store in Vancouver, Dilly Dally Kids.  It’s owned and run by a young local family and they’re amazing and the most sweet, helpful people ever.  They also ship all over the place and have really good shipping rates, so I’d highly recommend checking them out.}

We also happened to have a perfect little CAT dump truck on hand too (we found ours at Winners, but you can also find it here), so the only thing we purchased was a little blue truck from our local teacher store (but this one or this one would be amazing!)

Weird, but one of my favourite things about putting together play dough kits is figuring out how to best fit everything into the GLIS box…  We went with all of our little animal friends in the big spot on the left and the trucks in the middle spot in the front.

To finish off the kit, we added some natural wooden matchsticks {to be used as long grass, fence posts, or anything else the kiddos dream up} and a handful of autumnal trees from our Safari Ltd. Tree Toob.

Here’s the finished kit…  Wouldn’t this make a lovely gift for a special little someone?

My favourite part about play dough kits is that you set them out and the kids have everything the need to start playing / creating…

And open-ended play invitations like this tend to appeal to a wide range of ages, which I love.

One thing I tend to get asked about play dough kits is, “How are they supposed to play with it?” and my answer is always that there is no right way to play – so long as they’re following the basic expectations you’ve set out for play dough play of course. I find that kids don’t really need instructions when it comes to enjoying the combination of play dough, loose parts, and figures…  They have plenty of imagination and the best thing oftentimes is for us to stand back and observe.

They might create scenes that look similar to the ones in the story…

They might use the play dough and parts to retell the story…

Or they might do something completely different – which is 100% okay.

Either way, they’re most likely flexing their imaginations, hand muscles, and fine motor skills, which are all great things.

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