Fine Motor Skills, Occupational Therapy Activities, Visual Motor Skills

Learning Rainbow Order Stacking Cups

Colleen Beck OTR/L

Colleen Beck, OTR/L is a pediatric occupational therapist and the owner and author of The OT Toolbox website. She manages all of The OT Toolbox social media accounts and runs the popular newsletter. Colleen created The OT Toolbox in 2011 and since then has written thousands of blog posts designed to support therapy providers, educators, parents, counselors, admin, and caregivers in promoting the healthy development of kids. Check out Colleen's blog posts below:

by Colleen Beck OTR/L
February 26, 2015

Today we’re sharing rainbow stacking cups, possibly one of the simplest learning activities that we’ve put together. These DIY stacking cups are a wonderful way for teaching rainbow order, and so much fun to play with over and over again. Kids can benefit from the motor planning benefits of this activity too, working on gross motor skills and fine motor skills.

DIY Rainbow Stacking Cups for color identification, color order, and learning rainbows with this stacking and building nesting toy.

Learning Rainbow Order

This post contains affiliate links.

These rainbow stacking cups are really so easy to put together. I used

styrofoam cups
tape
and cardstock
in a rainbow of colors.

Cut the cardstock into strips lengthwise.

Tape the cardstock onto the rims of the cups. The activity is set for learning and play!

We had SO much fun with these rainbow cups! We stacked them up in random and rainbow orders. As we stacked, we said the colors of the rainbow. Little Guy (age 5) considers himself an expert in knowing the colors of the rainbow in correct order and was sure to correct Little Sister (age 3) in the accurate stacking of the rainbow.

We used the cups to build towers and buildings over and over again.

These cups make a great collection cup for a rainbow scavenger hunt. Go around the house looking for matching colored items to fill the cups. We found crayons, ribbons, scrap paper, toys, Legos…This is a fun way to work on color identification with preschoolers.