We played with them of course!
First, I put a bunch of big & little jelly beans in a tray with some toothpicks. I showed my 3 1/2 year old how to push the toothpicks into the jelly beans and connect them to make shapes. This was pretty difficult for him to accomplish & he poked his little fingers more than a few times. However, he was very interested & motivated to figure it out. He did eventually figure it out -- with close supervision, there were no major injuries and plenty of fine motor practice & early engineering going on...
A few days later, we added a bowl of jelly beans to some homemade Kool-Aid play dough... and made lots of interesting foods...
Here are a few of our creations...
The jelly bean color same off on our play dough as we played & the whole activity was sticky, but yummy smelling & tons of fun!
