Playdough train table

This has been in my sights for a few days, but it took me a couple of evenings to get around to collecting all the bits from around the house and making all the playdough for it.

I made seven batches of the playdough recipe that I have come to love deeply. Two greens, two blues, a yellow, a brown and a dark grey.

The idea was to make our own temporary train table on the kitchen table, using some cheap plastic tracks from Daiso and lots of random stuff like bits of lego we have and other toys and rocks and nonsense.

The store bought train tables are nice and all, but whoa are they expensive! and when the landscape is painted onto it already you don't even have that much flexibility with what you can create. So, I figured, we'd make our own with playdough for the landscape, then the kids can play with it until dinner time. After that we dismantle it and put all the playdough back in the airtight boxes and they can make another one that's just as unique another time, when the whim strikes.

The kids were five, four and two three year olds and boy did they do a fantastic job! I was amazed by how much team work they showed and how busy this activity kept them. It took about three hours for us to put it all together and at that point everyone was hungry and I served lunch outside (kitchen table was a bit um... occupied) then they came back in after eating to play more with it.

First we set up a basic figure eight track with some crossings so we could add roads later.

Then the kids set up a construction site with toy diggers, lego construction workers (that were mine when I was a kid) and random wooden bits of pretend building stuff. Then they worked on making a beach and ocean, with a rock and lighthouse to keep the one ship that we had safe. After that they moved on to creating a lake and a volcanic island on the other side of the table.

Here's the table with nearly all the playdough plastered on.

Finally, I broke out a few of the dry wall shims that we still have to cut up and make into roads (the kids wanted it to be both a car and train table, as well as the boat and later went and added a plane to the mix, although we never really squeezed in a runway. Maybe next time we can make an airport) You can see the drywall shim road pretty well in this pic...

They stuck glass nuggets onto the lake because they said it was frozen. Someone accidentally wrote off a car in the volcano, which made me giggle.Right at the end they decided that they needed a house, so made one out of some more of my childhood lego that my mum was awesome enough to save.Other random stuff we stuck in the playdough included a couple of tunnels for the trains, some lego flowers and trees, some rocks from the beach and some green craft pom poms for bushes. Here are probably too many pictures of the fun we had...
Our garden is distinctly lacking in the flora department, but if I had lots of flowers and foliage out there then I'd have got them to stick some real greenary in the feilds. One word of warning: If you attempt this with wooden train tracks I'd be prepared to have to scrub off the playdough afterwards. I once used playdough to hold a wooden train track bridge together and it stuck to it like boogers to a preschooler's tshirt. Not cool.

The lads went home later in the afternoon, already talking about the next play table we would make. I kinda knew this activity was going to go down well, but I really didn't expect the total emersion that the kids experienced with it. It was very cool to see!

If you have fewer kids, or don't fancy covering your entire table, then really, just have a go on a smaller scale. Just a couple of colours of playdough and some toy cars and animals would do a dandy job. I'll definately be doing this plenty in the winter months and seeing what variations we can come up with to keep it interesting. Dinosaur island is so on the cards!

Y'know, it's getting late and they are still playing with it, so dinner is going to be outside tonight. Good job the weather is with us!