Colour-Matching Drop Box

This September I started training to become a Montessori-qualified teacher.  It’s been busy studying with a pre-schooler and a toddler at home, but I’m hoping the course will help me to facilitate my children’s learning and to enable me to share our experiences on here with you.

The inspiration to create drop boxes came from an attempt to apply the principle of “control of error” to the children’s activities.  Control of error refers to a mechanism whereby a child can perceive his/her own mistake when undertaking an activity because the activity is designed according to the principle of one-to-one correspondence.  A typical example of this would be a jigsaw puzzle in which every piece is different and only interlocks with the correct corresponding piece.  

The first drop box I created was for my 2.5 year old who has developed an interest in colours (or at least the names of colours).  He would point to a red car and say “I want the green car” and this would lead to some frustration on his part and confusion on ours.  Rather than correcting him each time, I thought it would be more effective for him to realise his mistake through a self-checking element incorporated into the drop box. 

I purchased a sturdy box from Hobbycraft and cut some windows into the lid.  Around the edge of each window I created a border using eight different-coloured marker pens to correspond to the different-coloured pom poms to be posted into the windows.  One of the pom poms was multi-coloured, so I represented this with a multi-coloured border.  (I added the names of the colours above each window so that my 3 year old could also use the box and become familiar with the words that correspond to the colours).  Inside the box across the base, I made coloured circles to correspond to the coloured edges of the windows, so that when my son posted the pom poms into the box, he could remove the lid and check whether he had posted the pom poms into the correct window.  To make the self-checking element more pronounced, I could have created sections inside the box (as I did with the letter-matching box), but as I used only a few pom poms in this activity, they tended to fall exactly on the coloured circles, making it obvious which window they had been posted into.  The decision to use just a few pom poms worked well as I found my son’s concentration was beginning to wane as he came to the end of the activity.

The drop box managed to grip my son’s attention and after six or seven attempts over the course of a couple of weeks, he was able to match the pom poms correctly and refer to the colours of objects in the room accurately. 

What we used:

• A sturdy cardboard box (a shoebox would have worked well provided the coloured borders were not obscured by writing/patterns)
• A craft knife
• Marker pens
• Coloured pom poms

Click here to see our letter-matching drop box