Review: Hasbro Play Doh Fairytales

Play Doh have introduced a new range of fairytale Play Doh kits and we got sent The Story of the Three Little Pigs for the girls to try out.

The kit contains brown, yellow and pink pots of dough, a brick house (with a built-in pig mould), a straw house, a stick house, a wolf and a story mat with a picture mat on the reverse. The kit costs £7.99 at Amazon.

Rosemary (five) was very excited when it arrived and played with it for an hour, making pigs, putting bricks on the wall and acting out the story with the dough pigs and the wolf.

She has played with it three or four times since getting it, but generally prefers to play with the ordinary Play Doh, because it can accommodate her imagination a bit more. That said, she did start using the kit to branch out and alter the story, which was still using her imagination.

Being Play Doh, Eleanor (almost two) was able to join in to the extent that she plays with any Play Doh – namely, squishing it into blobs and passing little bits to me saying ‘Mummy make a ball, please.’ She did keep squishing Rosemary’s pigs, so it made it difficult for them to play together, though she was more interested when we made her a (yellow) pig of her own.

As with other dough kits, the pieces and the dough will be joining the big collection and will be used in all sorts of ways.

At £7.99, I think this would make a good present for a friend’s birthday or a brilliant pass the parcel prize. I probably wouldn’t buy it myself for our Play Doh collection, as it is a little too restrictive in terms of free imaginative play, but I think that it would probably be very useful for children who need something to prompt them into imaginative play. It could also be combined with reading the book – there are many different versions – and could lead onto other activities, such as acting the story out, drawing pictures from the story, talking about what happens to the wolf (different things depending on the version) or even making models of the pigs’ houses out of straws and cardboard and so on.

They also have Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood.

Disclaimer: We were sent a copy of this item to try out and to keep.