How To Help Your Child Learn: Sorting Activities

Through these four activities, children will learn sorting  based on  colour, size, type and categories. Make sure you let us know in Comments which activity your child loved the best!

Method:

• Make 4 monster bodies, one of each colour.
• Paste each monster body on brown paper bags.
• You can also roll the top of the paper bag so that it is easy for children to stuff lego toys.
• Make a few snips in the center of the mouth, push it through and paste the extras inside the bag.
• Now the usable mouth is ready.
• To make it more attractive, paste googly eyes and give a few details with marker pens.

How to play with your child: To start with the activity, take only 2 colours since these children are just learning about colours. Later, you can incorporate more coloured monsters for sorting. Tell them to sort the lego bricks as per their colour. This makes it easy for them to feed the monster. Once sorting is done children can start feeding the monsters till the bag is full. Once sorting is done you can ask your child to build something from the sorted legos and display it at home for a few days.

Enjoy!

The matching and sorting process begins during infancy. When children explore their environment they notice how things are alike, and how they are different. They begin to sort by their characteristics like use, shape colour etc.

Method:

• Take a large sheet or 3 trays
• Paste cut-outs of spoon, fork and knife in each compartment as shown in the picture.
• Place all the cutleries in another bowl

How to play with your child: Start with naming each cutlery one by one and talk about its use. Once it is done, let them identify each cut-out pasted into the compartments. Encourage them to pick up one cutlery at a time and match it with the correct cut-out. Slowly, ask them to start sorting things. Once sorting is done, the children can make a pattern with the same by placing one spoon then a fork and then a knife.

We tend to point out things like big and small or tall and short to our children in our day-to -day life. Let’s help children enhance this knowledge about shapes through this activity.

Method:

• Cut the straws into 2 pieces such that one is long and the other is short.
• Gather all the pieces into a bowl

How to play with your child: Take a piece of soft play dough and make 2 logs of it as shown in the picture. Now give the straw pieces to the children and encourage them to observe their sizes. Let them guess which one is long and which one is short. Once done show them how to place the straw in the clay log. It is fun when children label and place them in the correct position. Similarly children can sort marbles as per their sizes – big and small on the clay logs.

Source: blogspot

Once a child is matching more than two objects, they are sorting. Sorting involves separating objects into groups according to their similarities. As children begin to master their matching skills, they will try more complex activities.

Method:

• Take 3 bags and label each one with a marker as cat, dog and bird
• Now paste a picture below the label on each bag
• Cut pictures from old books and magazines of birds, cats and dogs
• You can also cut pictures of boys and girls or different vehicles as a variation

How to play with your child: Familiarise the child with all the pictures before starting the activity. Now, read the names on the bag and encourage the child to sort pictures accordingly. Encourage them to name them while sorting. To increase the complexity you can add objects and models to the tray. Don’t forget to appreciate them for their efforts.

Source: blogspot

Also read: How to Help Your Child Learn – Fine Motor Activities

Explore the entire collection of articles: Early Learning & Brain Development

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