Play Dough Crossword Puzzle

We have started our summer reading with the book The Ant and the Grasshopper by Katie Daynes.  Both of my sons are reading it and my first grader has been reading it on his own every night.  

The Ant and the Grasshopper by Katie Daynes is an Usborne First Reading Level One book.  The Ant and the Grasshopper is a retelling of one of Aesop's Fables.  In this story, the ant works hard all summer long to gather food for the winter while the grasshopper plays.  By winter, ant is warm and has food to eat, but grasshopper is cold and hungry. Ant invites Grasshopper to come stay with him and Grasshopper promises to work hard next summer.

The back of this book has puzzles to complete after reading.  The reader is supposed to match words with pictures and find differences between two pictures.  My son loved the puzzles the first time we read.  He also did a great job reading it on his own because this story is told in such simple sentences.

To practice some of the words that we were reading in The Ant and the Grasshopper, I made another crossword puzzle like I did for the book Elephants, but this time I made it out of play dough...you can call me crazy!

First, I made my crossword puzzle HERE and measured out the size of the puzzle on play dough "paper" with our play dough stampers.  

I used a birthday candle to help me stamp out the crossword puzzle (it was the right size, and easier to handle than a toothpick).  I couldn't make it too big because I didn't have a LOT of play dough.

My son read The Ant and the Grasshopper to me.  You can't tell here, but he didn't want me to take a picture.

I stamped out the answers on another sheet of play dough.  I skipped a word which kind of messed up our puzzle as we were working, but it still worked out.

The boys were eager to check out the puzzle.  My three year old even gave us one of the answers!

I read the clues to my son and he stamped the answers.

He liked crossing the words out of the word bank as he used them.

Here is our completed play dough puzzle.  Fun, but someone PLEASE tell me how we keep the letter stamps from rolling off the table all of the time!