Climbing wall out of the box! 7 ideas
Author: Heidi Alaerts
Teacher
Climbing wall according to "the rules"
The climbing wall, a wooden box, standing upright in a post, with a sliding plate full of holes through which you have to pull a marble upwards using two pull cords.
It requires cooperation between both hands, good eye tracking, learning to dose and concentrate.
This game gives the child an incredible boost in many developmental areas.
I offer the game to my toddlers, boys and girls aged four.
The images of the animals are very appealing.
When they are allowed to play with it, they are mainly focused on pulling the strings.
Bringing the marble up requires quite a bit of skill from a four-year-old toddler, some still have to live to be three years old.
But what if you use this game in a different way so that you can provide even more stimuli.
Suggestion 1
• place the strings at the back and let the child put the marbles through the holes, this requires a pincer grip and eye-hand coordination is addressed
• you can give specific assignments and dress it up: you can feed the animals, the child tells which animal gets a ball or listens carefully to which animal may be fed.
• If you add a dice with dots, you can also work on number and quantity concepts
Suggestion 2
• you can also turn the record over, now you have a blank record
• I put a color around the holes and the toddlers were now allowed to put the marbles with the correct color in the correct hole
• if you don't have marbles in different colours, you can also use pearls or iron-on beads or studs
Suggestion 3
• if you choose different materials, with a different structure, you will stimulate the children's tactile receptors, which must be well developed in order to later adopt a good pencil grip. As balls you can choose, for example, pompoms, marbles, pearls, bunchems or even balls of paper that you can let the toddlers make
Suggestion 4
• give the toddlers tweezers to pick up the balls, you will stimulate the tweezer grip in a different way
Suggestion 5
• you can design your own fun drawings for the back of the perforated plate, so it can be offered in different themes
Suggestion 6
• Have the child work with both hands at the same time so that both hemispheres of the brain are engaged
Suggestion 7
• place the plate in the middle and a jar on one side, let the child put the balls in the holes with one hand, the other hand may not participate, then switch hands, in this way you will cross the center line
