While whipping round the supermarket recently I stopped to pick up some plastic party cups, thinking that they may come in useful for one of our activities in the 50 day challenge. Isabelle has played a few times with them, but has mainly enjoyed just squishing them and watching them crumple - which is fine, of course! However, today they got a good outing and featured as our activity of the day.I have to hold my hands up and say this was a daddy activity. I have been unwell all weekend so while I died quietly in the chair beside them (never one to exaggerate), Simon and Isabelle got to work with the plastic cups. He showed her how to stack them up to build pyramids, but she preferred to simply stack them one on top of the other instead. They played together doing this for a while - he would hand them to her and they would count the cups as she stacked. When they had done them all, 12 in total, he would take them and unstack them and they would start again. Not only was it great for her counting, but also her hand eye coordination getting the cups to stack neatly on to one another. Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of this as I was a bit slow off the mark.
Then, the buttons came out. Isabelle adores her buttons and they have been getting
played with a lot this week. She once again displayed some classic transportation schema behavior by moving the cups from their box to the cups, pouring them from one cup to another, and bringing the cups to Simon and I....before starting all over again. She then went to find her favorite (real) cup, and spent some time moving the buttons between the plastic cups and her real cup.
She played very happily doing this for around 20 minutes, and you can see the concentration on her face in some of the pictures below. When she is moving her things about, she is so focused on what she is doing and has so much purpose with her movements. It's amazing to see such a young child have so much focus on an activity, and give it her undivided attention for so long. It must be truly exhausting for her to concentrate so much on what she is doing.
So, the cheap plastic cups finally got their moment in the sun, and I'm hoping we will be able to use them again in the future in lots of different ways.
