Discount School Supply CIRCLE TIME: Take a Tropical Vacation!

Hi! My name is Cory Smith and I develop and design curriculum products at Discount School Supply®. Curriculum, as in Math, Language, Science, Social Studies…so why am I writing about an art supply like Colorations® Tropical Colored Dough (TROPICAL) you ask? Two main reasons: I have a degree in art, and Colorations® Dough is a useful classroom material for all curriculum areas! Plus, Colorations® Dough is used in several methods of teaching, especially our Colorations® Best-Value Dough – Tropical Colors (TROPICAL).

It’s great! You get three pounds each of six tropical colors including buttercup yellow, sea foam green, lavender, light blue, melon and pink - that’s 18 pounds of top-quality bright and squishy dough! It comes in big, reseal-able plastic tubs that make storing and organizing easy. It can be reused again and again without drying out or crumbling, and it never stains. Plus, it’s non-toxic and doesn’t contain common allergens like latex, dairy and casein, egg, or even peanuts or tree nuts!

Naturally, Colorations® Best-Value Tropical Dough is a perfect fit for your Arts and Crafts curriculum. It provides children with varied opportunities to develop and widen their artistic skills! It targets NAEYC curriculum content areas for Cognitive Development in Creative Expression and Appreciation for the Arts. Plus, it’s excellent for practicing fine motor skills.

But, I like using it outside the world of Arts and Crafts to help widen children’s imaginations, especially when teaching ‘dry’ math skills, like geometry, or retelling the same nursery rhyme over and over. Need a new way? Ask the children to bring the characters in a story to life by modeling them in fantastic fantasy colors! Tropical colors! Who says the cow jumping over the moon can’t be lavender? And boring old geometry? Make the connection between 2-D shapes with 3-D with Tropical Dough! Roll out some dough and cut flat circles, squares, triangles, etc. Ask the children to form buttercup-yellow-colored dough pyramids, melon-colored spheres, or even sea-foam green cylinders and match them to the flat 2-D shape partners. Add faces to the 3-D shapes, name them, and have the shapes tell a story about themselves! I haven’t even mentioned the endless uses and how beautiful our dough is for forming letters of the alphabet and numerals in Tropical Colors – think about the bright future in learning your children will have!

Back to our Tropical Colored Dough and art usage, you could always ‘just’ make a brightly colored dough scene with sea foam green-colored breezy palm trees, a native island woman dressed in buttercup yellow with a pink fruit basket on her head, walking in front of Caribbean light blue-colored houses and call it a day. Wait! That sounds really nice. Make it more beautiful and realistic with Colorations® MultiCultural Dough (MDS)! Plus, add Colorations® Scented Dough (ORANGE) to make the fruit basket on the head of the island woman come to life! You’ll triple imaginations and possibilities when you add additional dough sets for endless combinations!

Watch our video and check out the different varieties of dough we have available below!