Dear Reader,
I know, I just said I didn’t think my girls are ready for different sizes in nesting toys. And then my toddler brought me this game her sister set down for her and I thought, “eh, why not?” Obviously we didn’t play the real game, but I realized that although they’re not really ready to nest the objects themselves, a step to helping them get there would be to let them pull each toy up and discover a smaller one underneath. And, since we already had the game (found on Amazon, but I’m not an affiliate, so I wont get anything if you get it from there. we won our copy from a library reading program), and I was a few activities short in my planning (toddlers are hard, yo!), I took the game and ran with it (which is a much different visualization when you have toddlers, lol).
It’s pretty easy to get set up. Simply stack all the figures and then just let your kids lift them up. The felt “hair,” came in really handy in this case, because it is much easier to grasp than the figures. But if you dont have this particular game at your house, you could use anything Russian Doll-ish in it’s ability to stack. Or some of the toys I said we owned last week. I will say, though that these toys are uniquely situated to simplicity for little fingers and being able to … Un-nest. And the hair making it easy to lift is actually a good way to develop pincer grasps in toddlers.
Really, they enjoyed playing with the little figures, even if they didn’t stack them on their own. Every time I had enough to set together, I would, and the game would continue. It is interesting the different personalities of these 2; One liked lifting the figures better and particularly liked the bigger figures (she later stuffed a napkin in it and pulled it out, over and over). The other kept running off with all the littlest figures, as they were just the right size to fit inside her little fists (Disclaimer warning: they are much too small to be left with your children unattended as they’re about as wide as an extra-wide crayon).
I’ve put the game away again, since I don’t want to lose all the pieces, but I will definitely bring it back out and see what their minds do with it again! Maybe they’ll even be ready to stack them by themselves sooner than I anticipated.
