Marble Balancing

This is a great small muscle activity for toddlers and twos. It requires the children to use their fingers and thumbs in order to get the marbles balanced on the golf tees.

I stuck the golf tees into a block of styrofoam so that they were perfectly upright.

Once the children mastered the skill of balancing the marbles, they took all the golf tees out and reinserted them into the styrofoam on their own.

This made balancing the marbles quite a bit trickier because many of the tees were now at an angle.

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Marble Painting

 We first tried marble painting a few weeks ago and the children enjoyed it so much that we decided to do it again this week. This time we used it on hearts for Valentine's day. I decided to set up the supplies on the floor since it requires a good deal of shaking to get the marble to roll around. Each child was equipped with a plastic box, a heart cut out, and a marble. I set out little bowls of red, pink, and purple paint for everyone to share. We placed the hearts in the boxes and got ready to paint.  

The children dropped the marbles into the paint of thier choice and either dumped the now paint covered marble onto the paper or used their fingers to fish it out. The second method was by far the most popular because two year olds love to get their hands all painty. 

 Then it was time to shake, 

shake,  

 shake!

 Once the paint on the mable was all used up, the children dropped it into another color and did some more shaking. 

So pretty!