Jelly Bean Games

I saw this idea on a website and thought it would be fun to do with the kids. Orin's job was to transfer the jelly beans from one bowl to another using only the tongs. It's actually pretty hard to do. It took a lot of concentration for me to do it. Orin did really well. You need a lot of coordination to open, then close and then keep the tongs together before opening them to drop the jelly bean into the bowl - Especially since you have to do the opposite with the handles as you want done with the tip (open the handles to close the tongs). After he got about 3/4 way through, I think he started getting mentally tired and got a little frustrated when it wasn't working perfectly each time.



I only have one pair of tongs, so I just had Micaiah practice sorting. He has finally gotten the idea of colors, although he still doesn't know every color. I gave him two different colors of jelly beans and had him sort them into different bowls. Maybe I was underestimating him, but I was very surprised that he was able to do it. He picked it up right away.


Of course, every few minutes he'd have to pop one into his mouth.


Once they were done, of course they wanted to switch. I knew sorting would be too easy for Orin, but he wanted to do it. I tried to make it a little more challenging and give him four colors.


Micaiah wasn't able to use the tongs, but he really wanted to do it so I held his hands and helped him sort the jelly beans. He was funny because he wanted to get all of one color in the bowl before starting to transfer another color. (We started with orange so we had to transfer all the orange jelly beans before transferring another color)


Finally, I had them use a tablespoon to pick up one jelly bean at a time and sort them. I gave Orin a muffin tin and he sorted the nine different colors into different holes.


Micaiah used the tablespoon too but this time I gave him four colors to sort. He did pretty well, but got tired of it before he was done and just started eating them.


As Orin was sorting he was telling me that the jelly beans were happy because they were with their families. When Orin got to the last jelly bean, it was purple. It was the only purple and I told him he could just put it in a hole by itself. He said he didn't want to because it didn't have a family and would be lonely. So he put it with the red and said, "Now the purple one has a family." I just thought it was really cute. I told him that the red family adopted the purple one and tried to explain what that meant. I don't think he was paying that close of attention so I'm not sure how much he understood. I'm sure we'll have plenty of those talks in the future.