One of our favourite things to play with at this time of year is bells. Jingle Bells has been both Ethan and Ivy's first and favourite Christmas songs, so they were very excited to see this discovery bin and explore some bells!
To increase the lovely jingly sound of the bells I used a metal tray as well as little pie tins. We love playing with metal items, I first discovered this with Ethan's treasure basket as he was so drawn to the metal items as we so often play with plastic and wooden toys.
First I set out the tray with the bells spread out and asked the kids to sort the bells into the little tins by size.
Ethan was able to do this quite quickly, and even Ivy could recognise the different sizes of bells and place them in different little tins.
The extra challenge for Ethan was to then put a different number of bells in each of the tins, which meant splitting up the small bells so that there were four in one tin and five in another. It took him a couple of minutes to figure it out, but he was very proud of himself when he did!
Once the bells were all sorted out we counted them again together then added some more fun and noise to our activity. I added a few more tins and we turned them upside down to cover a few bells each.
Then we shook and shook and shook the tray to jingle those bells and sing our hearts out! It makes such a pretty sound and the kids have so much fun playing with it. And it's such a simple little bin that doesn't make much mess, so it's easy to just leave out for the kids to come back to and explore whenever they like.
For more fun Christmas ideas, take a look at our Pinterest board:
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