I’ve been saving those pouch caps for a while now, thinking that I’ll use them for the kids’ activities someday. Here are the activities that we came up with so far, I’ll be adding more activities to this post as we go.
1. Find matching wheels for cars
You can download these printable cars for this game. Since my son is obsessed with cars, the first activity we did was matching the color of the wheels to the color of the car.
2. Pouch caps water play
We did this activity in the sink to minimize the spillovers (sorry for the dirty dishes in the picture). Stone seemed to enjoy fishing out the pouch caps from a large bowl using a ladle, and dropping them in a cup. Another time we did this activity on a table, he was transferring the pouch lids from a bowl filled with water to an empty bowl. A towel on the table helps.
3. Color-matching pom-poms to caps in a muffin/ice tray
We have a mini muffin pan that we use a lot for various activities. It fits the pouch lids perfectly. We put one pouch cap into each slot, and placed a pom-pom of matching color on top. This activity is great for developing color matching and motor skills.
4. Place a pouch cap of matching color on the caterpillar
This free caterpillar pdf file is available for download. It includes 6 colors for matching the lids.
5. Dropping pouch caps into a paper towel tube
We used tape to attach the paper towel tube to a kids’ table. And Stone had fun placing caps into the tube and watching them drop. Something about drop activities makes toddlers really excited 🙂
6. Transferring caps from one bowl to another
This activity is similar to the water transfer activity, but it’s less messy. We used an ice cream scoop for this activity. It was a bit easier for Stone to get caps into the ladle when they were in the water since they were floating, but this one helps to develop more precise motor skills.
7. Playdough play with caps
We used pouch caps in our play dough play as well. It’s fun to use one cap as a stamp and see what kind of traces it leaves on the play dough. We also built some shapes with the lids – made a flower, decorated a play dough Christmas tree, and placed wheels on cars.
8. Feed the dog
Once I showed feeding activities to Stone, he seemed to be really into them. For this one, I glued a picture of the dog to the tissue box. Tissue boxes are great for this because there is a tissue opening in the back of the box that we use for removing the food from the dog. Here’s a printable file of the dog to feed. Besides feeding the dog with pouch caps, you can use other items like dry pasta, pom-poms, or small balls.
This activity is also similar to a cat feeder activity that I did with my daughter when she was little. If you don’t have a printer, you can glue a white sheet of paper to the tissue box and draw a cat/dog face on the box by hand. See this post 20 fun activities for a toddler for an example (scroll to activity #6).
If you like this post check out my post Activities for 12-24 month olds or Activities and games for 2-3 year olds for more ideas.
