Peg People

I made this peg in the bottle game for the kids to work on fine motor skills.

The pegs are old fashioned clothes pins that I painted with watercolour paint and sealed with wood finish. I used food safe wood finish for butcher blocks because some of my kids still chew on everything so I wanted something non-toxic.

I made the pegs look kind of like people but with no real faces. This type of doll is taken from the Waldorf philosophy. I don’t know a lot about this philosophy but I thought the idea of the dolls that have no gender and no expressions interesting. The idea is that the children get to decide who and what the doll is. Of course so far the kids in my group have been more interested in seeing how many they can jam into the old juice bottle then in playing dolls!

 

This activity is a math activity since only so many pegs can fit in the bottle, and how many fit depend on how they are placed in the bottle. I get the kids to count and estimate while they are putting pegs in. Also the opening of the bottle is narrow so it can be hard to get the pegs out so the children need to use their problem solving skills!