The other day I was going through some of my old toys which my Mom had kept as keepsakes over the years. I found a box of marbles – glass ones, as well as plastic. Since RJ was very fascinated by them, we took them home.

(P.S. I don’t allow him to play with them unsupervised)

While watching him exploring the lot, I kept thinking of ways that could build up some skills. So I came up with few ideas, which we tried… and enjoyed! Here they are:

1. Pour the marbles into the inverted blocks

I put all the marbles in a bowl and kept  a spoon with it. We have mega blocks, which we inverted and color coordinated. Here, we are essentially looking at two skills:

  1. Building fine motor skills by pouring a marble with a spoon from the bowl to the block.
  2. Putting the marble into the correct block – according to its colour.

marbles

Above is our setting and below is RJ at work.

Marbles

And here is our finished work:

marbles

This was fun to do and helped build up fine motor skills of RJ. Getting a marble into the spoon and making it stay in it was a task, initially, which improved with every marble.

Next, we saw another pack of big blocks, which had a tiny circular hollow on the inverted side.

Marbles

RJ placed each marble on the hollow.

Marbles

This was just another way of playing with the blocks….

2. Dropping the marble into an empty bottle

This is a simple and very handy way of arranging the play. The spout of the bottle was small and some of the plastic marbles were pushed inside the bottle !

Marbles

3. Balancing the marble

Finally, I got out the linkers (flower shaped), from Funskool. Because of its shape (refer to the pic below), the thick middle of the flower linker kept moving. This made placing of each marble a little trickier for RJ. We dropped and displaced a few in the process. You can see the concentration on RJ’s face in the pic below:
marbles

In case you have marbles stocked up somewhere, get them out. Just make use of the toys lying around your kiddo’s room and invent a new game !


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