Decorate a fall tree with play dough leaves in lovely fall colors! This preschool activity is perfect for building hand strength and fine motor skills, and the play dough has a wonderful pumpkin pie scent. Playing with it put us in such a fall mood!

Fall Tree Play Dough Activity – With Pumpkin Spice Play Dough

I made some tree play dough mats by drawing a trees, coloring them in, and running the paper through our laminator. My two youngest kids had a fabulous time decorating their trees with fall leaves!

I found the cutest little leaf cookie cutters at Michael’s! If you don’t have a Michael’s nearby, I found some leaf cookie cutters on Amazon that are very similar. They look like exactly the same shapes, except that our set has a fourth leaf instead of an acorn. (But the acorn in the Amazon set is cute!)

Janie (3.5) was able to use the cookie cutters by herself with some practice. They have little springs on them, so I had to remind her to push down on the spring to make the lines show up on the leaves.

The springs also help push the cookie out of the cookie cutter.

Such a good workout for little hands!

How to make the play dough:

I used our favorite play dough recipe.

1 cup flour

1/2 cup salt

1 Tablespoon cream of tartar

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil

1 cup water

Stir all the ingredients together, and then heat on medium until the mixture forms a ball. I use a skillet and stir with my rubber spatula until it’s the right consistency for play dough. As it solidifies, make sure to keep turning the blob over so that all sides dry out adequately and don’t remain too gooey.

Once the play dough was cool, I mixed in some spices.

I didn’t measure exactly, but for a triple batch of play dough, I used about 1.5 tablespoons of cinnamon, 1.5 tablespoons of ground cloves, and maybe 1 -2 tsp of nutmeg. It smells so good!

I also split the dough into three parts and added red, orange, and brown food coloring. Yellow would have been good too!

Have fun with play dough! Need more fall ideas? Here are some to try!

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