10 Learning Activities with Pouch Caps. Creative Ideas and Free Printables
Children love playing with colorful baby food pouch caps, transfer them from one container to another using spoons, cars, sushi sticks, scoops, pencils, dolls and anything that come to their view. Some put on a cap on each finger and sing the Family Song, or thread the caps as if they are beads – to create a necklace. All these sensory bins develop motor skills and imagination, which is really great. But we came up with even more targeted learning activities with pouch caps, and we are happy to share our 10 favorites:
For these activities I have created a printable template that you can download for free, print in color or color yourself, and use with baby food squeeze pouch caps / tops / lids (however you may call them), pompons, Play Dough balls, or other colorful items available in your home or class.
1. Learning Colors: Matching and Color Recognition for Toddlers
They are so colorful and so many that a child gets fascinated and jumps into the game. Show your kid the caps and name their colors – one by one. Group them by color in separate pools or bowls, draw some color dots and encourage the child to match the caps... So many things to try!
By the age of 1, children are ready to follow a simple matching pattern thus preparing for their math and logic exercises. Print out Free Templates for Pouch Caps Activities, the one with 1x3 circles (the simplest) and color them using 2 or 3 colors. Introduce a pattern and corresponding caps to the child, place the caps one by one on their place while pronouncing colors. Remove the caps and ask the child to do the same.
In the Free Templates for Pouch Caps Activities there are more advanced options with 6, 9 and 12 circles that you may use with as many colors as you believe is appropriate depending on the progress of your little one.
2. Copy the Pattern: Visual and Spatial Skills Development
Unlike the previous activity, this time you will need 2 same-size pattern templates, one of which you color and another one remains blank. The child, seeing color scheme, shall select the right color caps and lay them out identically on empty template. The idea is not to cover the pattern with caps but to copy it by reproducing on a blank “canvas”.
It is also good to work on “left” and “right” concept: place the cap on the central circle and ask to find the matching cap for the left and same for the right circle.
This activity develops visual memory, special awareness and accelerates early math skills. It is great for a busy bag, travel box, circle time, for early finishers or as a break to change activities during a lesson. We used it as an addition to our Math Journal, week 4, where Mia was learning the number 3.
3. Building a Tower by a Vertical Pattern. Composing Numbers
This exercise develops understanding of spatial relations, train motor skills and practice simple addition within 3 (also as extra to the Math Journal activities).
Prepare your patterns: print out a template and color/laminate it (you may use the ones from the previous activities). Place a card vertically. Ask the child to build a tower using caps of the same colors (up to 6 colors). While building, comment, for example: “We start at the bottom, one green. Two orange on top of it. One and two makes three”. Add numbers to illustrate.
Use words like “top”, “middle”, “bottom”, “above”, “below” to practice spatial awareness and broaden vocabulary.
4. Zero Concept (or Void Cells)
Baby Food Pouch Caps in combination with Free Templates for Pouch Caps Activities are a great tool to explain Zero Concept to young learners. Print out a 3x3-template and color it the following way: use 1 color in a column and leave empty circles from the top. Place it vertically and ask the child to build towers as in previous activities. Than explain that there shall be 3 caps in each tower. What is missing is zero, or “no-cap”. Use number manipulatives to visualize.
5. Number Caterpillar: Number Sequencing
For young kids learning numbers, there is a 9-cells template. Color it and laminate for multiple use. With a dry erase marker write numbers from 1 to 9 - first in a regular and than in random order. The task is to find numbers, beginning with 1, look at the color of its circle and place a cap of the same color at the beginning of the “caterpillar”. Next number is 2 – we do the same – add its color to the caterpillar. Continue till 9. You will have a colorful caterpillar with random colors corresponding to the colors of numbers in the chart.
This activity is good to practice ordinal numbers. It helps kids transfer a square order to a line thus breaking the mental pattern and broadening their perception.
Erase the numbers and rewrite them in a different way. The new game is ready!
6. Flexible Pattern
Print out 2 identic templates. Fill in one of them with colorful pouch caps in any combination – depending on your learning purposes – and ask the kid to copy this pattern on his or her blank template. This activity develops concentration, increases attention span, helps train spatial relations and saves you time and resources as you are flexible to change it whenever you need.
The size of the template (1x3, 2x3, 3x3, 3x4) shall correspond to the progress of your child. For more of a challenge, encourage the child to "mirror" the task pattern on their grid.
7. Learning to Follow Directions
One of the most important skills to learn before school is to follow directions as a preparation to problem solving. For this activity I prefer a complete A4 page with 4 different size templates (4 sectors), colored in random order. The game may look like this:
Cover all circles with their corresponding caps.
Name one of the colors (a base color to work with).
Ask the child to remove all caps of the base color (for little learners) or count them at place. Count how many there are in each sector. Compose an addition problem (with 4 addends or 2 if counted by “left” and “right” columns etc). As you finish with this first color, move on to the next one till all colors are done.
You may want to skip one color in certain sector thus teaching zero concept in the problem.
Other options: use color sample or color words (depending on the skills of the kid). Use templates with colored circles or empty ones where you lay out the caps the way is the best for your lesson purpose.
8. Pattern Exploration and Critical Thinking
This activity is targeted on imagination and concentration. Think of a pattern, color the template and suggest the child to explain how to identify and memorize it.
I suggest using 2 colors on 2x3 frame first. Look at the picture below.
No.1 – reverse colors: yellow-red-yellow at the top and red-yellow-red at the bottom. Another way to explain it: yellow letter V and the rest is red.
No.2 – I see blue letter T and green in left and right bottom corners (or the rest is green).
No.3 – top to bottom: 1 and 2 of purple and 2 and 1 of orange.
The child may memorize using any unpredictable rules but what is important is the ability to reproduce the “picture”.
9. Copy the Picture by Memory
If the previous activity is aimed to identify and explain the pattern, then this one is targeted on memory training.
Show a picture (Free Templates for Pouch Caps Activities colored in a certain way) for some time (depending on the child’s age and skills) and hide it. Suggest a blank template of the same size and ask to restore the pattern from the memory using pouch caps. Instead of placing caps one-by-one moving from left-top to right-bottom, there has to be identified a pattern.
On the following picture the child will see green cross, horizontal line made of 2 orange caps and vertical line made of 2 pink caps. You may want to use an timer to increase the difficulty of this exercise.
Kids working in pairs may be asked to create "tasks" for each others thus building their logical patterns themselves.
10. My Emotions Color Rainbow
It's so important to teach children to recognize and verbalize their emotions. Not only it's crucial to understand the feelings, but also extremely helpful to develop a habit to notice own emotions and reactions. Having this in mind, I've created My Emotions Rainbow Chart & Mood Tracker where each emotion has it's color:
RED - angry, grumpy
GREEN - happy
BLUE - sad, bored
PURPLE - anxious, worried
YELLOW - excited
ORANGE - thoughtful
Every night before bed we go back through the day. Mia is choosing her color and adds to her "emotions rainbow". Sometimes she likes to draw her thoughts. This is our way to track emotions and keep memories.
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