Stone Sorting Caterpillar

An Activity For Your Toddler To Enjoy 

Items you will need are:

 Large smooth stones (or you could use some air-dry clay)

• Poster paint
• Washing-up bowl
• Paint brushes
• Aprons
• Newspaper
• Pencil
• Kitchen roll

Method:

• Wash all your stones in the washing-up bowl and dry them with kitchen roll.
• Paint the stones in different colours. Leave them on the work surface until they are completely dry.
• Arrange the stones in a long line starting with the biggest one first (as shown above) for the head of your caterpillar. Draw a caterpillar design on them i.e. circles for the body, lines for legs and optional spots or zigzags.
• Use a variety of colours on each of the stones and their parts, then once dry you can encourage your child to put the smallest body parts in order, sort the by colour or even by the number of spots.
• You could always paint colours or numbers on the back of the stones to give the ‘sorting caterpillar’ more variety of use.

• Lastly enjoy you child’s enthusiasm for sorting, counting and identifying colours.

From this activity, children can learn sorting skills i.e. sorting the ‘caterpillar stones’ by colour, size and number of spots. You can develop this activity further by increasing the number of stones, or coming up with your own creative ideas for the back of the stones.

This activity links to the Early Years Foundation Stage in:

Mathematical Development: Shape, space and measure:

• Orders two or three items by length or height

Download this activity pack and print for later