3 Cup Twisting Fine Motor Games

Discover how easy it is to make fun games for your kids using little more plastic cups! Laura, from Lalymom, explains how she made 3 different games using clear, plastic cups, markers, and stickers. To play each game, you decorate the cups as explained, and nest one cup inside of the other.

For the first game, she drew a race track (squiggly line) on the outer cup and a car on the inner cup. Her child can then twist the cups and try to get the race car to follow the track. The second game featured a Pac-Man style drawing on the inner cup and numbers on the inner cup. To play, the child can try to make the Pac-Man eat certain numbers. For the third game, they placed a cute butterfly on the inner cup and a variety of other stickers on the outer cup. The object of this game is to twist the cups to make the butterfly fly around all of the obstacles.

Learn how you can make all of these Cup Twisting Fine Motor Games.

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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