My students have always loved sorting / classifying. Whether it's sorting building blocks by color, finding all the big buttons in my button box, or separating the mini erasers by shape, sorting seems to be a basic part of coming to understand their world. Why not encourage it with fun materials, and add labels to those categories?!
It's easy to take sorting a step further with Venn Diagrams - which make us consider more than one sort-able attribute at a time. Do you see the red t-rex in this picture? It isn't green, and doesn't walk on 4 legs, so the child asked me where it should go. I helped him think it through - can it go in the green circle? No. Can it go in the 4 legs circle? No. Is there a place on your sorting mat that isn't for green and isn't for 4 legs? Children can do some amazing thinking!
Once children have begun categorizing things - not just sorting them, but also identifying how they've sorted them, it's a natural progression to count those things, and to compare what has more or less. Graphs make it easy to compare several categories. (More on graphs next time!)
Children can also begin to label things they observe, from a single word for each item...
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