This is another work I used to have in my classroom, and I knew L would absolutely love it. You can buy a lot of fancy texture matching works, but most of them actually show the different materials, so it’s more like a visual matching activity with a texture element. I wanted to provide a work that was primarily a texture matching activity, so I decided to make these texture balloons.
I took four blue balloons and four red balloons — each pair of textures has one red balloon and one blue. I filled the pairs with several different materials that I had in my kitchen: rice, black-eyed peas, flour, and sugar (I used a funnel to get them into the balloons, then tied them closed).
I put the balloons into a basket and showed L how to squeeze one blue balloon and then squeeze all of the red balloons to find the one that matched the blue one. Once she found a match, we put them side by side and started again.
We talked about how the balloons felt using words like “bumpy,” “squishy,” “crunchy,” etc. L loves this work and is great at matching all of the textures. N tries to put it in her mouth, because she knows that’s what you are supposed to do with balloons.
This is a simple idea… looks like a lot of fun!
Really clever idea!! Thanks for sharing!
Great idea! 😀 thanks for sharing
Her face in this picture is brilliant! Great idea?
I love this idea! Thanks for sharing 🙂
Cool! We will definitely try this out at our house!