7 Ways to Play with Toys with Your Toddler: Stacking Cups

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Looking for different ways to play with toys you already have? With the rising prices of basically everything, it’s hard to justify constantly buying new toys for our toddlers. But the pressure to have the latest toys is overwhelming. It can be easy to get into the monotony of playing with toys the same way every time. So, let’s explore some of the most common baby and toddler toys to give you new ways to play with old toys.

In this post, we discuss stacking cups and how to play with them in different ways! Stacking cups are important for infant and toddler development due to their numerous benefits for early development.

Here's why these simple toys are so valuable:

Fine Motor Skills: Infants and toddlers develop fine motor skills as they manipulate and grasp the cups. Actions like picking them up, stacking, nesting, and turning them over involve precise hand-eye coordination and finger movements, which help to refine their motor skills.

Hand-Eye Coordination: Stacking and nesting cups require children to align their visual perception with hand movements. This enhances their ability to coordinate what they see with what they do, an important skill for many daily tasks and future learning.

Spatial Awareness: Stacking cups in the right order and nesting them within each other promotes an understanding of spatial relationships and concepts like "bigger" and "smaller." These concepts are fundamental for understanding size, shape, and spatial orientation.

Problem-Solving: Stacking the cups in a tower or nesting them in the correct order involves problem-solving and critical thinking. Children experiment with trial and error, learning cause and effect as they discover how their actions affect the outcome.

Cognitive Skills: While playing with these cups, toddlers are introduced to concepts like "in" and "out," "up" and "down," numbers as they count the cups, and sizes as they notice their differences in dimension. These early cognitive skills lay the foundation for later complex learning.

Language Development: As children engage with these toys, parents and caregivers can introduce new vocabulary related to size, colors, and actions like "stack," "nest," and "pour." This exposure to new words enriches their language development.

Now that we know why stacking cups are important, let’s discover how you can play with them with your toddler.

Seven ways to play with stacking cups:

1. Build towers: This is the most common way to play with stacking cups. Build the tower up, then knock it down! There are so many ways to incorporate language learning into this activity.

• You can work on taking turns (“My turn!” “Your turn!”) by alternating placing the cups on the tower with your toddler.

• Say “Up! Up! Up!” as you build the tower and “Boom!” as it falls.

• You can teach spatial concepts like on, on top, up, down, etc.

• Use verbal routines, like “Ready, set, go!” when getting ready to knock the tower down. After saying the routine phrase a few times, pause before saying the last word and look expectantly at your toddler to see if they will complete it.

• You can also talk about the colors of the cups, how big they are, and what is on them (pictures, numbers, etc.).

2. Vocalize into the cups: Bring one of the cups up to your mouth and vocalize a sound into it to see how your child reacts. Hand a cup to your toddler to see if they will copy you. You can produce:

• Non-speech oral sounds (blowing raspberries, clicking your tongue, smacking your lips, etc.)

• Exclamatory sounds (whee, yay, whoa, wow, uh oh, etc.)

• Animal sounds (moo, quack, neigh, roar, woof, ribbet, etc.)

• Motor sounds (vroom, beep beep, choo choo, zoom, etc.).

• You can also babble into the cups.

3. Use them in a sensory bin: Scoop and dump with the cups. You can pour the sensory filler between two cups and teach concepts like in vs. out, full vs. empty, fill vs. pour, scoop vs. dump, more vs. all done, etc. This is also a great opportunity to work on following directions (“Scoop it up,” “Put it in,” “Take it out,” “Dump,” “Pour it out,” etc.).

4. Hide toys under them: Take small toys and hide them under the cups. You can say, “Knock, knock! Who’s there?” while knocking on the cup before finding what’s hidden underneath, “Hi, ___!” and waving after uncovering the toy, and “Bye-bye, ___!” while covering the toy back up. You can teach concepts like in vs. out, on vs. off, under vs. over, etc. Other words you can teach include: hide, peekaboo, where’d it go, where is it, etc.

5. Play pretend: Pretend to drink from the cups, give sips to stuffed animals or dolls, use the cups as hats, bang on them like drums, etc. The possibilities are endless! While pretending to drink or give sips, words you can target include: eat, drink, mmm, yummy, more, all done, num-num, (drinking noise), ah, water, juice, milk, etc.

6. Use them in the bathtub or sandbox: Play with the cups in the bathtub by filling up the cups and pouring out the water. You can fill the cups with foam soap or bath paint as well. In the sandbox, you can scoop and dump the sand or even build a sandcastle!

7. Play the "ah-choo" game: Place a cup (or small stack of cups) on your head and say, "AH-CHOO!" as you pretend to sneeze, and the cups fall off your head. This encourages your toddler to bring their eyes toward your face. The more they see your mouth move as you speak, the more aware they will become of their own mouth.

Hopefully, these ideas give you new and fun ways to play with stacking cups! Which one was your favorite?

Don't forget to share with your fellow toddler-parent friends!