Since the children are interested in the ball drop, Jessica brought in ball pit balls (red, green, yellow, and blue) for them to play with at the ball drop on the playground. The children were so happy and excited to see so many balls on the ball drop.
When Jessica dumped the balls into the track, the children were saying, “wow,” while jumping on the ground to show excitement. Austin, Ezra, Morley, Tong Tong, Leila and Penny came to explore as soon as the activity was ready. Penny noticed the balls were stuck on the track. Jessica was wondering if Penny would get the balls unstuck? Instead of getting the balls out, Penny stacked more balls and she said, “it’s a house." Penny was building a house on the track.
Morley also noticed the balls were stuck. He said, “oh ball stuck." So, Jessica asked him what to do and he pulled some balls out to get them unstuck. He was so proud of solving the problem and yelled out, “I did it."
Austin and Evie liked to push the balls off the track. The children liked to name the colour of the balls too. Jessica collected all the balls into a bucket and asked the children if they could find the red balls to drop onto the track. They saw the other colours too and the children did so well on recognizing their colours. Maddie found two balls on the ground and she yelled out, “blue and yellow,” with excitement.
Benji and Theo liked to count with Jessica. We were counting how many green balls on the track. I wondered how many green balls could fill the track?
Ezra noticed there’s a gap between the balls on the track. He was curious why the balls were not connected and Jessica told him that there’s a ball stuck in the shaft. He looked into the shaft, saw the ball, reached his hand to the ball and said, “I got it."
Leila, George, Nihal and Ava liked to pick up all the balls on the ground and drop them back onto the track. I wondered if they were tidying up?
Tong Tong and Jackson liked to stretch their arms and body to drop the balls on the topmost track.
When the children drop the balls through the holes, they engage with fine motor development, colour recognition, matching principles, as well as engage with bilateral and hand-eye coordination. The children not only follow the ball with their eyes, but they also have to coordinate their movements to return the ball from the collection tray to the top of the track.
Now, I wonder what else can we do with the ball drop track (e.g. car race track, add water do become a ball slide, etc.) or we can add different colour bins (red, green, yellow, blue) for the children to get the balls from the collection tray to the bins to do colour sorting?
