Hairdresser Invitation to Play

Such a fun way to work on scissor skills whilst also encouraging creative use of loose parts.

Hairdresser invitation to play.

What you need:

- Play Doh shaped into small heads

- child safe scissors

- selection of loose parts for adding features to Play Doh heads and for accessorising hair (I used chopped up pipe cleaners, googly eyes and beads)

- tree branches for hair

- a cutting tray (I just used a dinner tray to contain the hairy mess)

How it works:

This is an invitation to play so the idea is to simply set up the materials and let your child explore them. I provided my son with a sample customer for his salon just to give him some direction but he was free to take the activity wherever he wanted.

My son's first instinct was to trim the hair on the sample customer I had left in the middle of the tray. I pretended to be the customer and I prompted him with questions to ask relating to lengths and styles of hair.

Just a tidy up trim for the first customer.

First happy customer.

My son then wanted to create his own customers. It hadn't even crossed my mind but the first thing he did was to use the pipe cleaners as 'super spiky hair'. I love it when he shows me an unexpected way to use a set up that I have given him.

Using pipe cleaners for 'super spiky hair'.

He then enjoyed adding features to the customers' heads using the loose parts available.

Using beads for eyes and a pipe cleaner nose.

Most amused with his 'crazy customer'.

He managed to create quite the collection of customers and he lined them up on the cutting tray ready for business to open.

Customers waiting for their haircuts.

My son enjoyed trimming the tree branch hair into different styles.

Lots of concentration!

Once again he surprised me by then coming up with the idea of threading the beads onto the pipe cleaners to create 'rainbow beaded hair'. 

A single long beaded hair for this lucky customer.

This was such a fun activity and I loved how my son ended up thinking of innovative ways to use the materials. Definitely one we will be doing again.