From about the age of eight months a baby can begin to benefit from playing with stacking cups.  Give her one stacking cup nested in another and let her discover that they come apart!  Let her watch as you put them back together, then see if she pulls them apart again.  This simple act will strengthen her ability to make her hands do what she wants them to do.  This dexterity is a fundamental motor skill, one she will build on in the months and years to come.  When she has mastered pulling two apart, see if she can re-nest them.  After that, increase the number of cups. 

When this becomes routine for her (proof that she is learning), begin again with two cups, putting the smaller one open-side down and nesting the next larger over that, much like a Russian Babushka doll.  Increase the cups until she eventually nests all the cups together this way. 

Stacking cups are very colorful and come in all the basic colors.  Say the name of the colors and see if she begins to differentiate between red and blue and yellow after a while.  You can concentrate on red one day, another color the next.  Also, show her two cups and tell her one is 'big' and the other is 'small'.  She has learned this in a practical way already, but now her understanding has grown because although she cannot speak the words, she is learning what they mean when she hears them. 

Show her how to invert the cups and stack them one on top of the other.  Build a tower!  This will take a bit more coordination, but when she masters this one she will have made another great leap in eye-hand coordination.  Can she stack two smaller cups that will be the same height as one larger one? 

Stacking cups can also be used in water play and in the sandbox.  Show her how to scoop up a cup of water or sand.  Show her how to pour either substance from one cup into another.  She will begin to understand that smaller cups don't hold as much!  She has to pour many of the little cups into the bigger one to fill it up, but one try with the larger cup into the smaller cup will make if flow over! 

by Rachel Goodchild

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