Description:

Babies are fascinated by movement and often enjoy watching objects roll, slide, bounce, fall, and stop suddenly. To encourage your baby to explore how things move, set up a variety of ramps using cardboard boxes, pieces of wood or an alternative material, and encourage them to place different objects at the top of each ramp to see what happens when they let go. How do the objects move?

Promote learning by:

Support your baby’s understanding by describing their actions as they place objects at the top of each ramp and let it go. Describe how the object moved down the ramp. (E.g., “You’ve placed a truck at the top of the ramp. I wonder what will happen when you let go? It is rolling down the ramp”).

Support your infants understanding of speed by describing how fast/slow the object is moving down the ramp (E.g., “The ball rolled down the ramp really fast/The block is sliding slowly down the ramp”.)

Additional learning:

To extend on this experience, you may also wish to add different surface coverings to the ramps to provide further sensory engagement such as artificial turf, sandpaper, fabric, carpet offcuts, gravel, or bubble wrap. This will allow opportunities to discuss and compare how the objects move on different surfaces.