All Sorts of Sorting (weensie alert)

This week's "weensie" is designed to help your little one work on, yeah you guessed it, sorting! What exactly is sorting all about you ask? It's the skill of being able to identify a particular quality in an item and then separate a group of items using that quality. Some common qualities a preschooler may use to sort items include size, shape, color, texture or item use.

Many children (or, ahem, adults) are naturally drawn to sorting. I remember being on a play date when my little bean was maybe 18 months old and watching her sort out some markers by color, putting all the "lellows" together and then all the red ones in another pile. More recently she's taken to walking around the house with a purse and stuffing it with every "lellow" object in sight (yes, yellow is her favorite color). There's obviously something about sorting that's quite satisfying for toddlers. Maybe sorting gives them a sense of bringing order to the world around them?

Regardless of why they are drawn to it, sorting is an important precursor to many of the skills our lil' kiddos will be working on once they get to school. Sorting and classifying objects helps children begin to notice how items are alike and different, and creates an awareness that is vital for math learning. But for now, we want to make sure our sweeties grasp this concept naturally, without stress, right? The good news is that there are tons of ways to begin incorporating sorting into the everyday:

• Picking up their toys. Maybe larger toys go into the toy box and smaller toys go into baskets. At our house everything has a designated spot (i.e. stuffed animals go in their basket, play food goes in it's designated bin, books go on the bookshelf, etc.).
• Sorting laundry. My bean loves to dig through our dirty clothes and hand me all the "white stuff" on laundry day. Yeah, it takes me a little longer to get all the whites in the machine but it's so worth it when I see how proud she is to be helping.
  
• Putting away the silverware. I usually remove the cutlery basket from the dishwasher and let her sort the knives, spoons, and forks into the appropriate section of the drawer (supervise this one carefully and please omit the knives if they're sharp).

It's also SUPER simple to set up some quick and easy sorting tasks (say that 5 times fast). When starting out, it's best to limit the sort to 2 different options (i.e. red and blue, round and square, or big and little) so as not to overwhelm. Here are some great items for sorting, that you probably already have lying around the house:

• craft supplies like beads, buttons or pom poms
• assorted types of dried pasta (penne vs fusilli)
  
• Legos, coins, colored paper clips, stickers
• with slightly older or more sorting savvy kiddos you could try rocks, shells or screws

Providing some type of sorting tray with 2 sections or simply giving your child two containers makes the task that much more concrete. Model how you'd like them to sort the objects and then let them have-a-go!