Are you looking for activities and ideas for teaching sorting skills in your preschool, pre-k, or kindergarten classroom? Learning how to sort is an essential early childhood literacy and math skill, but young children don’t develop these skills on their own, we must provide them with sorting activities that will help them develop these skills.
Why is Sorting Important?
Sorting can help your little learners make observations about how things are alike and how they are different — which are essential early literacy and math skills. As adults, we arrange objects, ideas, and events into convenient groups or categories daily. For example, in your kitchen your silverware is probably sorted in a drawer, and you keep certain foods in the refrigerator while others are on shelves in a cupboard.
Sorting also helps children develop critical executive function skills, which are skills that involve memory, attention and problem-solving. Research shows that the stronger a child’s executive functions skills are when they enter kindergarten, the more likely they are to be successful in school and life. But executive function skills do not just develop on their own, young children must be provided with learning activities to help them develop these skills.
Importance of Sorting in Preschool
Learning how to sort objects is a precursor math skill that comes before numerals and more advanced mathematical computations can be learned successfully.
When planning sorting activities for young children, it’s important to note that using concrete objects they can touch, feel, and manipulate for hands-on learning is always best because young children learn from the concrete to the abstract. Visual representations can be used as supports to review concepts after concrete objects have been used.
Sorting Activities for Preschool
The following is the sequence of sorting skills and how they develop:
1: Matching is selecting objects that have similar attributes, otherwise know as “the same.” Activities that encourage matching help young children develop logical reasoning skills.
2: Sorting and Classifying activities come after matching. This skill involves grouping objects together by their similarities and differences.
These similarities and differences are often called attributes. Attributes are characteristics, qualities or traits of objects – they’re what a you can see and describe. When young children engage in sorting and classification activities, they’re developing higher-order thinking skills.
Identifying and describing attributes is the ability to recognize common likenesses and differences between objects. Some of the most common attributes for sorting are color, shape, size, how it feels, and how or in which context the item is used.
3: Comparing is the ability to determine if an object has more or less of an attribute. Words like bigger than or smaller than are used in comparison activities.
4: Ordering is about arranging objects according to increasing or decreasing amounts of an attribute – such as size. Words like biggest or smallest are used when ordering.
How Do You Teach Preschoolers to Sort?
Have you seen these sectioned chip and dip trays at the dollar store? They have so many uses in the early childhood classroom!
Sorting by Color
You can easily use these trays to help teach children to sort objects by color into each section. You don’t have to have the fancy, colorful manipulatives from the teacher store to do this activity. Your kids will enjoy sorting common items like pom-poms, buttons, or even paint chips into the sections. The possibilities for sorting with chip and dip trays are really endless.
Add a pair of tweezers or tongs and invite your little learners to use them to pick up and transfer the manipulatives into the tray. Now you’re teaching sorting while also developing those important fine motor skills at the same time – it’s a win-win!
Sorting Materials
You can use many different things for sorting in your classroom, these are just a few to get you started.
- Shells
- Keys
- Buttons
- Seeds
- Pom Poms
- Paint sample chips
- Socks
- Fruit counters
- Teddy bear counters
- Transportation counters
- Farm animal counters
- Dinosaur counters
- People counters
- Ocean animal counters
- Wild animal counters
Shape Sorting
Another way to sort is by shape. You can invite your students to go on a “shape hunt” to search for objects of different shapes in the world around them. Afterwards, you can invite your students to sort pictures of different shapes.
Sorting Activities for Toddlers
When it comes to introducing your toddlers to sorting, it might be easier than you think. You can ask a 24-30 month old toddler to match objects or pictures that are the same, which is a beginning stage of sorting. Specifically, you can hold up a picture or object and ask your toddlers to find other ones “just like this one.”
Sorting Socks
You can create a super fun sorting activity for any age group using real socks. I found these socks in the dollar section of my local big box store, but you can also ask family, friends, or colleagues to donate old socks for your kids to sort. Invite your kids to sort the socks and then clip the matches together with a clothespin for additional fine motor practice. For even more fun, string a piece of yarn between two chairs or attach it to the wall and invite your kids to hang the matching socks on the clothesline.
Books about Sorting
You’ll definitely need to read some age-appropriate picture books about sorting to your little learners to introduce and reinforce the concept of sorting. This sorting book list features age-appropriate books to help you teach sorting skills.
Sorting Activity Bundle
Now that you know all about sorting and you’ve got an age-appropriate book list, it’s time to provide your kids with plenty of fun hands-on activities to help them practice their new found skill. The Sorting Activity Bundle is full of all the activities you’ll need to help your little learners become sorting pros in no time.