Last Updated on October 13, 2022 by Editorial Team
What didactics are better than games and activities to preach essential skills to toddlers? Classification and sorting are essential skills that children need to grasp at a tender age. Not only as academic notions, these games and activities can also turn into a renewing break between study time.
A student’s ability to distinguish and segregate precedes mathematical problems and thus can essentially be a math skill. They learn these skills naturally as they arrange their toys. For instance, kids often can segregate all balls in one bag and all cubes in another. These skills can be enhanced with custom-tailored sorting and classifying activities even if the kid is learning compromised.
Accordingly, we would scan our picks of sorting activities, especially for toddlers like preschoolers and kindergarteners. These picks can help the little ones engage in something exhilarating with their siblings and friends.
Sorting Activities- How do they refine young kids
Children, as we all know, enjoy nothing more than taking part in games and activities. While we are aware that games are crucial, the advent of game-based instructions made them upscale skills. Here we have outlined a few reasons why you should encourage your preschool/ kindergarten children to get occupied with sorting activities.
- These activities provide children with a fun and colorful premise cheering up critical thinking skills; they can also help little ones improve perseverance.
- While they hold things to place them at right positions, they may extensively use limbs; thus they ameliorate motor skills too.
- Such activities improve concentration and build visual perception, thus gauging information better.
- Along with the increased attention span, students will also be able to work on their communication skills if parents or teachers engage with them while indulging in these activities.
Sorting and Classifying activities for little learners
Comprehending the benefits, you may be anticipating to look into the picks that we suggest. These activities are tailor-made for young learners who need elementary standards of complexity.
1. Sorting Animals
This activity will require your kids to classify a set of animal figurines into wild and domestic animals. If you are a teacher, you may request your students to bring their own set of figures or bring them yourself and ask students to take turns doing the activity. Children can participate in this activity either by themselves or you can assign them into groups of four or five. Apart from preaching sorting skills, this activity can also be beneficial in helping them learn a bit more about the animal kingdom and its classification.
2. Sorting Game 1
This game can be downloaded to play the sorting that involves the player arranging different objects like fruits and desserts into multiple shelves. With eye-catching graphics and smooth gameplay, this may be a great take-in for your children to play. There are multiple levels of difficulty within the game that you can adjust based on your child’s age group, such as “Sorting Game,” which is designed for children aged 2+, “Sort it out 1” designed for children aged 3+, or “Sort it out 2” designed for children aged 4+. You can download this colorful sorting game from the App Store, Google Play, or Amazon.
3. Bead Sorting Activity
Entailing minimum effort to set up this game can be a great fit if you wish to improve your child’s classification and motor skills. To start with, collect different beads of medium or large size along with some plastic containers that you can sort them into. Now, the child sorts them based on colors and sizes in different bowls.
You can start off with two or three different types of beads and then increase the types of beads in the mix. Ensure to supervise them during this activity to prevent them from doing anything unsafe with the beads.
4. Water Sort Puzzle
This interactive online game involves students cleaning up a messy laboratory by sorting different colored liquids into various test tubes. This activity aims to sort the liquids into the glasses until they are filled to the brim and are of the same color. The difficulty level of this game increases as you go and can be the ideal activity to encourage your kids to think and solve problems. Introduce your kids to the enticing world of chemistry with the help of this engaging and unique sorting game.
5. Fun with Shapes
Shapes and colors may be one of the first few things that kindergarteners and preschoolers will learn about. Thus, this stipulates children to sort different shapes that they find in the environment around them and identify them. For this activity, you will be required to label large boxes with names of basic shapes such as circle, square, or triangle, and more. Now, ask your child to look for objects in their vicinity in these shapes and put them in each box.
6.Bubble Sorting Game
The game needs the player to sort the bubbles in such a way that there is one color per tube. The game has twelve unique levels with five chances in each round. This simple online game is an excellent way to introduce your child to sorting activities. It can also be a fun path to take if you wish to teach your children critical thinking and sorting skills while they are engaged in playing games. You can access the game on any web browser from your PC or mobile phone.
7. Pygmy House Rooms
Having a dollhouse is often a dream for kids, and it would be an engrossing idea to employ these for practicing sorting. Most dollhouses come with furniture like tables, chairs, etc. Mix up all of these fixtures and ask them to sort these in different rooms. In this activity, they would need to sort shelves and chairs to the living room; stove and fridge to the kitchen, and so on. This simple yet enticing game implicitly makes little one practice sorting and classification. Barbie doll sets may be a superlative pick.
8. Deck Frolic
Fascinatingly, decks can be an interesting pick for toddlers to teach sorting. Hand over a set of cards and call them on to sort these based on colors to start with. Once they master sorting colors, you may ask them to sort based on shapes or numbers on them. This activity draws some quality time where little ones can brainstorm to place every deck. You may use any set of cards that have different colors and numbers.
9. Pick the Odd
Since sorting needs the kid to distinguish between the items provided, encouraging them towards games like Odd one out can assist. Place 4 items before them in a row. For instance, an apple, orange, carrot, and banana. Now ask their little hands to pick out the odd one (carrot here). As the child learns, you may increase the number of items to make it challenging.
10. Attire sort
Every one of us should learn household chores, one among which is sorting garments into shelves. Situate dried clothes in a place and ask the child to sort them to be placed on different shelves. They may sort them into Innerwears, Shirts (top-wear), and bottom wear. This activity not only advances the sorting capabilities but also makes them read up on household chores too.
What skills are associated with sorting?
Sorting by itself is a peerless skill. However, mastering sorting abilities can implicitly make kids grasp several subsidiary competencies as well. Let us ponder into them one by one:
- Spotting and reporting traits: By indulging in sorting activities, kids will learn to identify various props around them. Accordingly, they can also discern various features as well. For instance, while a kid sorts boxes, they may notice a flower vase to be square, not only this, they also implicitly note the color, size and place of it.
- Complementing: While they sort all similar things in a place, they learn to identify which two items match. This is ensured when they notice traits of those items.
- Comparing: While kids see what two items match, they implicitly learn to compare every item with their attributes like size, weight and color.
- Sequencing: When kids have spotted and identified traits, they order the items into sequence- smallest to largest or vice versa.
All these abilities often are part of sorting skills; however, each of these skills can have a distinct set of applications later in life.
Conclusion
Be it arranging books on the shelf or accessing a phone number from a diary; sorting has a number of real-life applications. Thus, mastering these at a tender age is privileged. Whether online or offline, sorting activities take hardly any time to set up but are loads of fun to play. Contemplate the above-stated picks to check if any of them would fit your sorting goal. We strongly suspect you may be feeling hard to pick just one of these.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,