by Barbie L.
Lately my family has been relying on meal kits to ease the mental load of meal planning, and I have been alarmed by the number of small containers we’ve accumulated. In addition to reusing them for food storage, I’ve started adding them to my child’s toy collection. Here are some fun toddler activities we’ve come up with.
Lid Matching
Separate lids from (non-breakable) jars and have your child match them up. My three-year-old loves screwing and unscrewing the lids all by herself!
Jar Hunt
Trace different-sized containers on a large sheet of paper, then hide the jars. Ask your child to find them and place each jar in its corresponding outline. If you wanted to make the game more educational you could write uppercase letters in the outlines and lowercase letters on the jars, then ask your child to match them up. Other ideas for matching are sight words (write the same word in the outline and on the jar), matching words to corresponding pictures, or matching numbers to a corresponding number of dots.
Castle Building
Show your child that you can build a tower or castle with empty containers and they will get creative building their own structures. Where’s your bedroom in the castle? What’s the tallest tower you can build? When they start to get bored turn the containers upside-down; in your toddler’s eyes it’s like giving them brand new building material.
Countdown Calendar
As December approached I used nearly all the shallow containers we’d collected to make a magnetic advent calendar, by gluing magnets to the bottoms, decorating the tops, and hiding treats inside. My child was delighted! And, it doesn’t have to be magnetic, it could be as simple as numbered containers in a box or tray.
How have you repurposed empty food containers for your child’s entertainment?
Update: I tried my own numbers-to-dots matching jar hunt suggestion from above, and it was a hit! My kids were actually fighting over who got to practice their numeracy, so I deem it a parenting win.
My younger child is pretty new to one-to-one correspondence, to help her out, I alternated colors when labeling numbers as an extra clue (if her counting was off by one the color wouldn’t match). This had an added benefit of differentiating even and odd numbers, which my older child enjoyed. After we did the jar hunt, we lined up all the containers in numerical order, then separated evens and odds, and practiced counting by twos. My older child also enjoyed stacking the containers in numerical order vertically. To add in some fine motor practice I brought out some crafting pom poms and we put the correct number of balls in each container. Both kids were dedicated to the task!
