Pouring Activity

I have accumulated various items to build up his box of pouring activities. To some people, it's like I'm collecting "trash"!

Containers of different sizes:

- small Yakult bottles, Vitagen bottles are good to start off with as it's about the right size for his palm to comfortably grip it and has wide openings for pouring out of & pouring into.

- Sunkist/FruitTree juice bottles are the next size up. It's also contoured like Yakult & allows for easier gripping. Also wide openings are good for placing a homemade funnel into it.

- 100Plus bottle was sawn in half to use as a homemade funnel. The neck of the commercially avaiable ones were too narrow to allow for beans & sago seeds to pass through. Commercial ones are good for liquids.

- paper cups (e.g. soya bean drink from pasar malam) can be a bit soft depending on quality, so I used 2 of the same stacked together.

- plastic cups (e.g. McDonald's milkshake container) with a cover and a hole for the straw are used for pushing fusilli pasta/golf pegs through the hole.

Variety of items to be picked up/ poured, available cheaply from supermarkets/ hypermarkets:

- coloured cotton balls: roll up your own, dip in food colouring & leave to dry completely. Easiest to pick up cos you can make it very large. Colours add visual interest. Easy to clean up when there's a spill or he throws it out (compared to beans & sago which you'll spend a long time cleaning up)

- fusilli pasta/ penne pasta/ macaroni: when pincer grip not yet developed, he used his palm to pick these up. They provide tacticle input too. Fusilli pasta is sold in colours (mixed tricolour) so may be of more visual interest to the child.

- Kidney beans: in terms of beans, it's good to start off when practising his pincer grip cos they're one of the larger types

- Black beans: next size smaller for pincer grip practice

- Black eyed beans: next size smaller than black beans

- Soya beans: not recommended cos the skin comes off too easily

- Green beans: tiny. Used for pouring it out of the container & practise scooping with a spoon

- Sago: super tiny. Also for pouring out of container & spoon scooping. Sold in colours of pink & green which gives visual interest. Gets sticky when accidentally touches water on the floor & his drool drips on it.

I have a variety of instruments to scoop with:

- spoons of different handle length

- spoons of different depth R.g. old baby's 1st spoon would be quite flat & therefore more challenging. At the opposite end of the spectrum are milk powder spoons which are very deep. He still has difficulty adjusting his wrist to keep the spoon horizontal to avoid spilling the beans, but is getting better at it. In between these 2 ends of the spectrum, you have spoons from mamak shops when you buy a take away, spoons from chicken rice seller, spoons from ice-cream stalls in shopping centres when you buy the ice-cream in a cup rather than in a cone etc...

I also have mini brush & dust pan (sold with the spray bottle from Carrefour) which I keep together with in his pouring activity box. Useful for accidents & intentional spills! Good to teach him the consequences of his action i.e. that he has to help clean up esp. when he intentionally spills, and for muscle co-ordination, hand eye etc.

Today, he used a spoon (from mamak) to scoop black beans from a very wide opening container into the Sunkist juice bottle, through a funnel. He was mostly picking up just 1-4 beans at a time due to the way he was using (or not using) his wrist. Showed him how to dig in to get more beans & how to keep the spoon horizontal while moving to another container. After a while, he lost interest, so I got out a paper cup (to keep up the interest) and he continued practising.