Posts Tagged "developmental"

Activity – Bottle + Pasta

Posted by Michelle on Jun 28, 2010 in Activities, Parenting, Therapy | 4 comments

Playing with Pasta

I’m always on the lookout for fun activities for The Little Empress to do after school and during the weekends. She does well in school but is very prone to meltdowns once we’re home. We’ve discovered that the key to preventing her epic meltdowns is to keep her busy with activities that appeal to her nearly insatiable drive for sensory input. As I am sure you can imagine, it is always better to provide a safe and fun activity rather than leave her to her own devices. (When left to her own devices shortly after she’d finished with this, she was upstairs climbing onto counters. Oi.)

This is a simple and fun activity that I copied from her school involving an empty parmesan bottle.

MATERIALS

• Empty parmesan bottle (with two different openings)
• Pasta (long & short)

NOTE: You don’t have to use pasta for this activity; it is just what I had on hand. Other fun objects that you could use include coffee stirrers, pompoms, chenille stems, whatever you have handy.

WHAT IT TEACHES KIDS

This activity helps teach kids about size (what fits, what doesn’t), fine motor skills (placing objects through small openings with precision) as well as provides tactile (handling the pasta) and visual stimulation (the shapes of the pasta and colors.)

HOW TO PLAY

Gather the materials and set them in front of the child. If they’ve never seen the activity before, demonstrate how the objects can be put into the container through the different sized openings. Have the child experiment with what will fit and what won’t fit. Another fun thing to do is figure out how to get all the objects out of the container once they are in.

The Little Empress showing off her handiwork

She’s seen it before at school so she was delighted to play at home. She happily dove into the activity which kept her busy for about a half hour as she stuck pieces of pasta into the parmesan bottle and then shook them out. It is pretty rare for something to hold her attention for so long so I was more than delighted with the results.

Shaking it out

And here’s another adorable photo of The Little Empress as she shakes the pasta out of the bottle. I just love the expression on her face.