More toddler maths

With this activity Idris explored one to one correspondence and capacity as well as some patterning and a touch of probability! This activity was created to build on an interest that Idris showed in this egg box from the recycling pile. I watched him take it out and experiment with putting other objects inside and trying to close the lid. Initially I gave him a box of coloured cotton spools to put in and out of the box, but they didn't seem to interest him too much. Later on in the day I found a tube of Christmas tree decorative bells and they appealed to him much more! There is no picture of this set of equipment all pretty and ready to go as Idris was far too eager to explore it!

 He spent quite a bit of time putting them one at a time into the sections of the egg box. He always built a square of nine, even when he filled them up in a different order!

 He added some of the cotton spools in after a while. The metal tubs that you can see are 3 sets of differently sized sauce and dipping pots that I picked up in the pound shop. They fitted pretty well into the sections on the egg box and Idris experimented with how many bells would fit into each pot and whether he could stack the pots on top of each other.

 If he was really careful he could balance all ten bells in the largest of the pots. His fine motor control, hand strength and finger dexterity got a great workout with these as he was holding two or three at a time in one hand and rolling them through his fingers to place them in a cup.

 He started an impromptu game of hide the bell and was delighted when we hid one under a cup and moved them all around and he had to guess which one the bell was under! He was very good natured about this age old magician's trick and loved the pantomime of looking under each one and shaking his head no when there was nothing there!

After losing interest in hide the bell he concentrated on stacking different combinations of pots on top of each other. This is an enduring interest of his. He likes to try and stack all sorts of things of all shapes and sizes.