Common household items can be all the tools your child needs to improve coordination. Build a tower using non-chokable items around the house. When your tower is complete, knock it over and start again!

Learning Goals:

• Take Risks and Persist Through Challenges
• Build Control and Fine Motor Skills

Tips for Adults:

• Narrate what you notice your child is doing and introduce new vocabulary. You can say something like, “You just made the base more stable by adding another rock.”
• Support your older child’s growing understanding of cause and effect relationships. You can point out something like, "The tower fell over! Can you think of a more sturdy way to build it?”
• Early math is about sorting and understanding quantity as a way to describe groups. Try mixing up the pieces and prompting your toddler to sort them into piles, then count how many are in each group. Order the groups from most pieces to least pieces.

Materials Required:

• A variety of non-chokable materials to stack, such as:
  • river rocks
  • thin slices of wood
  • tile samples
  • wooden, metal or plastic bowls
  • tin cans
  • napkin rings
• Mat, carpet or blanket (optional, but reduces sound as materials fall)

Instructions:

• Choose one or a few materials and sort them neatly in various bins or baskets.
• Place a mat, carpet or blanket on the ground to create a soft workspace that will muffle the sound of items falling.
• Set up a few towers as inspiration.
• Invite children to explore the different materials, grasping, stacking, and combining them in different ways.
• Encourage them to knock down the tower and build again!

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