Bowling Boxes

Objective

To help my daughter with the skills of rolling a ball to a specific place (Gross Motor) and problem solving (Cognitive) by helping to balance boxes on top of each other

Materials

• cardboard boxes
• plastic cups
• take away containers

(basically anything from your recycling bin that is light enough to be toppled over by a rolling ball)

Today we had yet another extreme cold weather advisory so Bean and I stuck to playing indoors.  As mentioned in a previous post, she adores throwing and (attempting) to catch balls so I thought it would be good to use those same balls but for indoor bowling. We do not have one of those plastic bowling sets with the pins, but we do have tons and tons of cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes.  I stacked the boxes up into a tower and placed cups and smaller baskets near the top then asked Bean to roll the ball to the tower to knock it down.  I demonstrated first and she smiled and got excited and of course wanted to try her hand at it.  I began building again, but she was at my side, so I included her in building.  She did not really help, but it was my attempt to at least get her thinking about balancing all of these items to construct a tower. This activity is open ended as there is no right way to do it and there are so many possible configurations that could be built.

Have you tried this at home?  Do you have ideas for other material that could be used as stacking toys (blocks)?