Cup Stack and Sort

Cups are a very easy activity for children to play with.  They are very versatile and can be used for many different activities.  In this post, I'm going to show you what my kiddos and I did with these cups that I found at the dollar store.

What you will need is very simple: CUPS.  I found these multicolored hard plastic "tumblers" at my local dollar store probably two years back.  If you can't find these specific cups, multicolored thinner plastic cups that you find in the napkin aisle at a local grocery store will work as well.

In this activity, we learned:

• Precision and how to place the cups inside one another and side by side
• Colors
• Sorting
• Stacking
• Counting
• How to use eye-hand coordination
• Cause & effect
• New language - we talked about how high we could build the towers, how to put cups in a line

Here are some of the things that we did with the cups:

First, we placed cups one inside the other.  We talked about how the cups fit together and made a big tower.  This also took some strength as the cups became stuck at times, but my kiddos' persistence won that battle.

Next, we stacked them and made even bigger towers.  Here we counted how many were on the bottom, second row, top, etc.  We then had fun knocking them down!

Then, we placed them in "piles" according to their colors.  Actually, my son did this on his own and I helped him by reinforcing what he had done and kept encouraging him to make those piles by placing the cups according to their color.  

Finally, we practiced putting cups into a line.  Although they weren't placed by colors, we still learned about coordination and also the beginning and the end of the line.

We had a lot of fun with this activity.  My kiddos sat for almost 20 minutes with the cups.  I can only say that doesn't happen that often with toddlers!