Stack and Roll Cups

Nifty Nesting Toy

I love a stacking toy in both hard plastic and soft cloth materials, and these plastic nesting stacking bowls prove no exception. We received this popular set as a gift many years ago, and still use them for various imaginative play today even though my kids have long passed the infant stage.

The set contains ten colored bowls with textured sides, easy for little hands to manipulate. Each bowl gets progressively smaller in another shade of the rainbow. You can nest the bowls together and you can stack them on top of each other. But in addition to building and crashing towers, you can also put any two neighboring bowls together to form a plastic ball. It also comes with one small golf ball sized plastic yellow ball. The ball has a smiley face and makes noise when it moves, though you can’t take it apart.

The small ball can go inside two of the cups put together to create a bigger ball that also makes noise as it moves. The yellow ball can also sit on top of any of the bowls, thanks to a hole in the bottom of each one that makes a flat surface. The holes also make it easy to separate the balls into two separate bowls again by pulling on the bottom of each one.

These balls make great bowling balls for an impromptu game. Or you can put smaller bowls inside a ball, build five balls, or any combination as long as the two bowls you want connect are sequential. In other words, 4 can connect to both the 3 and 5 sized bowls. Spinning the balls makes a fun distraction as well.

My kids still use them as bowls in the pretend kitchen, and as elements in their other creative building projects. They love the bright colors and rolling the balls though I rarely see them stacked any longer.