Cheerio Stacking and Counting
This was a fun fine motor and counting activity that also doubled as snack!
MATERIALS: play dough
dry spaghetti noodles
cheerios
I first put down the play dough and stuck one spaghetti noodle in it. After Finn saw me do that he wanted to stick in the others. Don't be worried if they break, they're a little fragile and tiny hands aren't always careful. It also helped to have different sized noodles.
In between eating handfuls of cheerios I encouraged Finn to try and string them on the noodles. At first he only put them on the longest noodle but he soon saw he put some on each.
Once he had played for a while I took off the cheerios and lined up three noodles. We counted out 3 cheerios and one at a time put them on the first noodle. We did the same thing for the next 2 so we practiced counting to three times. Next we put one cheerio on the first noodle, 2 on the second noodle, and 3 on the third. I pointed to each one and repeated how many cheerios were on each noodle. This is an easy way to introduce numbers as a value.
