SILENT OR LOUD SOUND GAME FOR TODDLERS

Does this happen to you: everyone shouting at home, you can hardly hear your own thoughts?! Oh, yes! I know exactly how it sounds!

Sometimes it’s hard to explain to toddlers to keep their volume a bit lower. And sometimes I have a feeling my kids don’t know how to speak in low, soft voice! So, I have come up with a little game to teach my toddler a difference between silent and loud. As you will see from a description, this game is extremely easy to prepare and it’s very flexible. In reality, you really don’t need anything from the store for this game! Chances are you have everything you need right at your home!

Items I used for Sound game are:

• 3 egg cartons, simply because I had them at home! One to hold all items and another 2 for sorting silent and loud items. If you don’t have egg cartons, you can use any container but what I love about egg cartons is that kids can use small egg holes to practice their fine motor skills!
• 1 metal tin, we used candy tin we had on hand, empty of course. Candies long gone!
• 2 pieces of paper with words “silent” and “loud”, although toddlers can’t read at this age, it’s always a good thing to expose them to pictures of words.
• 30 random small items from around the home. This is why I said that this game is very flexible: you can use whatever you have at home. There are only 2 things to have in mind: keep items smaller than a container you’ll use to create sounds, and use a variety of items in terms of materials!

You can see our setup right here. We tried to keep it simple! In reality, I have put together this game in less than 5 minutes because everything used is either from recycle bin or laying around the home.

And this is how we played Silent or loud sound game:

• I invited my toddler to pick an item from the pile and ask her to name it if she can. If she didn’t know the name, I would tell the name and invite her to repeat it after me.
• Next I asked her: “What do you think, will ____ make loud or silent sound?” as she was placing the item in a tin. She would make a guess and in some occasions she was right! In others, she was a bit surprised!
• As a last step, she would place it in an egg carton with loud or silent items, depending on sound that item created in a metal tin.

And all over again until we went through all the items!

My toddler really enjoyed playing this game. After all, who wouldn’t like to be invited to make some noise?! And mom enjoyed seeing how much she loves it because we learned about so many new things today:

• she learned some new words she previously never used (expanding vocabulary),
• she used her fingers to transfer even tiny items like beans and rice from egg carton to tin and back to egg carton, working on her fine motor skills,
• we learned how sounds can be very different depending on materials.

Here is the list of items we used to make sounds for this game:

This is a great little game to play with toddlers at home or at kindergarten / day care center. Hope you will try it with your toddlers because it’s really fun and easy to prepare and yet, toddlers can learn so much by playing this game!

To get a bit more background about an importance of sensory play, we recommend you to read book Sensory Bins: the What, the How & the Why. It has basics covered with many play ideas, all in easy to understand language (for parents like me!). Another great book to check is 99 Fine Motor Ideas for Ages 1-5. Packed with fun things to do with toddlers and preschoolers!

In January, we are participating in 31 Day Sensory Play Challenge with the different daily sensory prompt. You can read more about this challenge over at Adventures of Adam.

TOMORROW WE ARE PLAYING WITH
SENSORY BAGS! 

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Mihaela Vrban

Mihaela runs Best Toys 4 Toddlers blog and loves to come up with new ideas how to use old toys her 2 daughters keep leaving on the floor to slip over. She loves them despite the fact that they call her mommy few hundred times a day, and it makes her nuts.

http://besttoys4toddlers.com/