Camilla and Roman: Cupcake Castle: Play Dough and Scissors Skills

Playing with colors, play-doh, and scissors - the ultimate combination of creativity and developing fine motor skills for preschoolers. I set up our play-doh play station and we were off to explore our new colorful play mat.

We are busy exploring the wonderful Russian culture hands-on. More posts are coming!
Tuesday, June 17 Russia - Korea Republic
Sunday, June 22 Russia - Belgium
Thursday, June 26 Russia - Algeria

You can read more about it here: World Cup for Kids

This post is a part of cultural hands-on activities for the World Cup for Kids project. Every day a team plays a game in the World Cup, there will be a blog post on kids activities related to some aspect of the culture of the country of the day. World Cup 2014 started on June 12 in Brazil. The participating countries: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Cameroon, Chili, Columbia, Costa Rica, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Honduras, Iran, Italy, Japan, Korea Republic, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Uruguay, USA.

Saint Basil's Cathedral

Saint Basil's Cathedral, Moscow, Russia, was build in 1561 on orders from Ivan the Terrible.

And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.
And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.
- Revelation, 4:3 - 4:4 (KJV)

The structure and colors of the building follow closely this biblical reference.

Hence, the rainbow of colors!

Exploring and Creating

I offered a picture of the Cathedral to Camilla and started saying how this building is called a cathedral. She said, "Castle. It's a castle!" I tried to correct her, but when this girl makes up her mind - so be it.

We moved on to explore the colors. She said, "Oh, wow, cupcakes! A cupcake castle." This statement canceled out all the activities I had planned for her. We went her route instead. It is all about a "Cupcake Castle" now.

We took her toy cupcake set; and she started by building domes on the picture trying to match the colors.

This activity kept her busy for quite some time. She took the cupcakes off and rearrange them several times.

Scissors and play-doh

We are working on scissors skills. In the picture below, she still has a problem holding the scissors straight. The easiest engaging activity for beginning cutting is to make a "snake" from play-doh and cut it in pieces.

I laminated the picture and helped her to make the rainbow of small play-doh balls. She used the balls to decorate her cupcake castle - great for creativity and fine motor skills! The castle got very popular. Camilla gave it as a graduation present for a 18 y.o. girl - huge success! And I kind of miss it...