Stacking Cups
Stacking Cups are one of those great manipulatives that grow with children. Even the youngest babies like to hold these and chew on them, throw them around, pile them up and knock them over. This is a great way to explore “cause and effect” and they can explore the shape of the cups through their mouths as they take in the information through their senses.
As children get older, the stacking cups are a visual representation of sized sequences. In order to put all of the cups together, children have to determine the order in which they go, from largest to smallest or from smallest to largest. Remember, it is very hard, some would say impossible, for young children to consider two aspects of a situation at the same time. Therefore, it is hard to think about something being “smaller” and “bigger” at the same time.
I like to put the stacking cups in the water table or in the paddling pool.
How else do you use stacking cups?