Simple kid’s activity with sensory benefits

In honor of National Occupational Therapy Month, Occupational Therapist Elise Spronk shares how to play Tumbling Tower. We love how simple this activity is for kids, as well as how many different variations you can do with it!

Here’s what you need to play tumbling towers:

• Paper cups
• Plastic letters (you can also use stickers or a marker to put letters on the cups)
• A cotton swab or coffee straw
• A straw

First, have your child stack cups in a pyramid with one letter on top of each cup.

Next, instruct your child to put the cotton swab or coffee straw inside your standard straw. 

Then, have your child take a deep breath in and blow through the straw in an attempt to knock over the cups!

Use the cups that got knocked over to spell different words. This helps your child work on spelling, and you could also instruct them to write out the words to work on handwriting.

Not only is tumbling tower easy to play, it’s also packed with sensory benefits!

1. Fine motor coordination: Placing the cotton swab or small coffee straw inside the larger straw helps your child work on fine motor skills.
2. Proprioception: Your child will quickly learn the need to gently stack the cups, else they will tumble down before the game even starts!
3. Oral motor skills: It’ll take some skill to figure out how to use the straw and cotton swab as a makeshift blow dart, but you can bet that’ll help your child develop oral motor skills.
4. Visual skills: As your child’s eyes track the straw or cotton swab flying towards the cups, visual skills are worked on.

If your child can’t read or write yet, there are a lot of different ways to play this game. You can put pompoms on cups and label them as the king and queen, prince and princess, and guards. Instruct your child to try to knock their castle down! They’ll still get plenty of sensory benefits without the additional challenge of spelling and writing.

You can also place preferred and non-preferred foods in the cups. Whatever food gets knocked down, the child has to smell the food, describe it, touch it, or perhaps even taste it. This is a great variation for picky eaters!

Want to learn more about how sensory preference might be impacting your child and how occupational therapy at Kinetic Edge can help? Then check out this article by Occupational Therapist Elise Spronk. 

Share: