Bottle Caps Fun - Teaching Maths and Language For Ages 2-5
I have been wanting to collect enough bottlecaps for a long time. However, the various drinks I had were all of different kinds.. SO I made a commitment to drink only one type of ice coffee for a week (just see the sacrifices a mother has to make) and managed to collect my 21 white caps and 5 blue caps. Only then I managed my phonic game. The white caps are for consonants while the blue caps are for vowels. I pasted stickers on them and wrote all the alphabets. This was for Ko to sing the phonic song to the tune of abc song. Instead of singing the abc song, you sing "air, ber, ker, der" by using an animal. For me I used a stickee, something with a suction that could stick to certain surfaces. She loves songs so she really enjoyed it.
I thought that was the end of the bottlecaps lifespan till we did another activity lately... a marble run activity! I got the inspiration from one of my favourite blogs: A happy mum.
In her blog, she did not use bottle caps but made her own marble holder using toilet rolls. I improvised it at the last minute and tada!! Anyway, let me share what I did with them. Time is on my side as it is the school holidays. However, it can be difficult trying to let them do certain activities due to their age difference, thus art is always the perfect way: it is time consuming and you might create a future artist!:)
This was what I used:
1) 3 rolls of washi tapes or coloured tapes
2) Collected around 10 (toilet rolls and kitchen rolls)
3) Marbles
4) Paints (optional)
5) Wrapping paper (optional)
You can also use cotton balls if the marbles are too noisy.
For Imm, I let him wrap the toilet rolls with paper as he enjoyed using glue. He also painted some toilet rolls.
For Ko, I let her use more of the washi tape. I would cut the lengths and she would paste them on. It does not matter if she does not paste properly as I would just help her to tape it over later on. It kept her really occupied for sometime, whew! Otherwise, her favourite complaints are always she is hungry.
After a few days of work (yes a few days as their attention span isn't too long), I set up this marble run when they were sleeping. I thought it was pretty easy from the blog post I saw but I realised I had to do adjustments, the gravity matters and I had to soften the impact of the marbles using slopes so the marbles would not suddenly fall out. Anyway, you could see the batman one; that was painted by Imm while for the princess one, I cut out some princess pictures for Ko to paste.
You must be wondering what the bottlecaps are for now. I used the other side and paste them into a box (they tend to shift when the marbles hit them). I wrote numbers on them so it could become a "points" game. For Imm, it was more for addition while for Ko, it was for recognising numbers. They really enjoyed it!
Thus, what I learnt was not to discard materials that you had painstakingly collected but to think of other ways to use them. It matters! Or else I have to drink 20 bottles of coffee again.
