Preschool Christmas STEM Experiments with Play Dough

If you really love Christmas, then you’ll love these STEM activities using just red and white beads and green play dough. So festive and fun even for the youngest Christmas lovers!

Our Christmas STEM challenges continue with today’s activity. Today, Bo (our preschooler) was challenged to create something Christmas-themed from beads and playdough as an engineering activity for kids. Her results were fantastic with the playdough Christmas tree challenge and the entire process was a whole lot of fun!

STEM Experiments: Build a Christmas Tree from Playdough

Let your children conduct their own STEM experiments with these simple supplies. My preschooler played around with how the dough and the beads stuck together in differnet ways for quite a while before finally settling on the Christmas tree design.

This becomes a STEM experiment when you ask, “what can you do with these materials?” I asked Bo if she could make a tower, a face, and an alternating pattern. She chose to make the Christmas tree on her own. I guess she was in a holiday mood!

What you’ll need:

I recommend using a plastic mat for this activity to protect your surfaces. For some reason, our play dough was a bit sticky, so we were happy to have the mat so the sticky dough didn’t get all over the table.

Let the children have everything they need for the project, but don’t give them more than a handful of beads. If you give them too many, they might get distracted from what you’re trying to do with them (at least my kids do). Just give them enough to complete the STEM experiment and keep the rest out of sight.

First, Bo explored the materials. She stuck the beads into the play dough, smoothed the play dough out, rolled it around, and smooshed it out again.

After playtime, it was time to get to serious business. Bo made a tower, a face, a matching set, and a pattern.

Then, she turned her attention to crafting her Christmas tree. I thought she did a great job! The beads ended up looking like ornaments on her play dough tree.

Monkey was busy with her school when we did our STEM experiments, but she also would have loved this activity as a 10 year-old. There is no age limit to scientific discovery!