Bringing Sorting to Life

Today, we had fun sorting!  As I was planning for math this week on sorting and patterns, I noticed how boring the textbook delivered these concepts to children.   There were no hands on lessons!  I decided to bring life to the concepts!  :)

I brought in two very large storage containers filled with my son's toys.  After giving the class a few minutes to explore the objects, I asked them to think about how they would sort the items.   The class worked in two very large groups.  Within those groups, some children worked together in pairs while others worked alone. 

Here are objects sorted by color:

Here are objects sorted by type:



After we finished sorting, we had a Gallery Walk to share our work.  The kids really enjoyed this lesson.  To help clean up our sorting, we ended the lesson by sorting by size as we returned the objects back into their containers. 

We, then, talked about how we use sorting in the classroom and other places.  Next up, patterns!

Happy Teaching and Learning!