I was in Hobbycraft a little while ago and spotted these pompoms.  I thought they would be an ideal thing to use for discovery play, to let the children explore and choose how to use them.

They loved looking at them and feeling them.  They talked about the colours they could see, about big and small ones.  This was all totally unprompted, I just provided the resources and they led the play.  I was there to ask questions and reinforce the language they were using.

The pompoms were so soft, Little Miss stroked this one like her toy baby rabbit, and also stroked her cheek with it!

It was fun to drop them from a great height too, to see if they would fall in the basket.

Little Miss spent far longer at this activity than her brother, which is fairly usual!  Next time we have the pompoms out, I will introduce some different containers, including some muffin trays as you can see in this post from Hands On: As We Grow.