Hobbies And Interests
Restaurant
Imaginative play games help young children build social skills and develop creativity. Have your child run a pretend restaurant, with you as his customer. Order foods like pizza, hamburgers or spaghetti and have him make them out of modeling clay and serve them to you on a paper plate, or the plastic cover of an old margarine container. Let him use plastic knives, a garlic press, rolling pin, cookie cutters and other old kitchen supplies to help mold his food.
Clay Charades
Turn your modeling clay into a hands-on guessing game like Charades at your next party or gathering. Split the guests into teams; instead of having players mime something for teammates to guess, have them mold it. Players will have to use their imagination to come up with ideas to get the message across. For example, if the challenge is to model "The Catcher in the Rye," the player may sculpt a small book, a catcher's mitt and a loaf of bread to help his teammates guess. Don't worry if people don't have advanced sculpting skills -- it only makes the game more amusing.
Guessing Game
The simplest version of a guessing game is to roll a piece of clay about the size of a marble, turn over three cups and put the marble under one cup. One player mixes up the cups and the other has to find the marble. Alternately, hide something small, like a marble, in a lump of clay. Roll around three identical lumps and have the person guess which lump has something embedded in it. For a memory testing game, make a dozen small clay marbles, two each of six colors. Cover each with a paper cup and mix them up. Raise one cup to see what color marble lies beneath, then try to find its match. If you do, you get a point. If not, cover both marbles again and the next player takes a turn.
Board Games
Many games can be re-created with modeling clay. Make a grid on scrap paper or cardboard and make small, round discs out of modeling clay for checkers, or mold your own chess pieces. Replace lost dice in board games by molding your modeling clay into small squares and poking the number holes into each side with a pencil. If you've lost your Monopoly houses, hotels or game tokens, make modeling clay versions to use as markers. If you feel really ambitious, design your own game on butcher paper and mold game tokens and play pieces with clay.