Sorting Autumn Leaves!

By Tina Cho

Here's an easy and fun fall activity to do with your preschooler. Enjoy the outdoors and the fall season by taking a nature walk with your child, collecting pretty leaves, and sorting them. Not only will this simple project help your child learn valuable math and science concepts of sequencing and size, but she'll also get a chance to appreciate the beauty of nature and its changing seasons as she creates a pretty leaf collage.

What You Need:

• 4-5 different-sized leaves
• 12" x 18" construction paper or two 8.5" x 11" papers taped together
• Glue

What You Do:

1. Take a nature walk. Gather four or five of your child's favorite colored leaves from a park or your backyard. If you live in a four-season climate, take advantage of the brilliant crimson, gold, and brown leaves. If you live in an all-year sunny climate, just collect interesting leaves of various types and sizes.
2. When you get home, spread the leaves around your work table. Point out the different sizes of leaves to your child, small, medium, and large. Ask her to put the leaves in piles of small, medium, and large. For very young kids, you can sort into just small and large leaves.
3. Put your large piece of construction paper on the table. Tell your child she can line the leaves up from smallest to largest. Have her put the smallest leaf to the left and the biggest leaf on the right side of the paper. Continue asking her questions such as “Which leaf comes next? Which leaf is the next biggest?”
4. Once she has them lined up correctly, show her how to make small dots of glue on the backs of the leaves. She can then glue the leaves on the paper from smallest to largest. (Make sure she glues them back on in the right place.)
5. Have her write her name on the paper and lay it aside to dry.

When it's finished, you now have a wonderful, autumn leaf collection to hang on your wall as a decoration. Refer back to this helpful visual whenever you ask your child questions about relative size. You can also use it to discuss with her the four seasons and how the trees change with each season.

Tina Cho has been an elementary teacher for 11 years, mainly in the kindergarten classroom. She is currently a freelance writer.

Classifying Objects FUN!

Give your child's quantitative and verbal skills a boost by encouraging her to play with and describe all kinds of items! Simple actions such as grouping and counting items based on their similarities and differences will enable her to master more complicated math concepts down the line such as odd and even numbers, integers, as well as multiplication and division.

By classifying articles based on color, shape, size and texture and then discussing each object's characteristics with your child, you'll also greatly expand her vocabulary as well as her sorting abilities.

What You Need:

• Lots of items for sorting and categorizing

What You Do:

1. Go to the store and buy a bunch of stuff that you need around the house. Encourage your child to help you put the items you purchase away. Ask her to describe each item she's putting it away in terms of basic attributes such as shape and texture.
2. Let your child help put away the dishes. Ask her to explain why she's putting each object in a specific place. Then, have her count the number of objects in each pile.
3. Go on a hunt around the house for fun things to categorize. We used coins, buttons and books, but you don't have to limit yourself to these objects.
4. Tell your child to sort the items you found based on color and size and how they're used. Finally, ask her to count the objects in each group.
5. Have your child separate her toys into piles. Ask her to identify talk about differences in shapes and sizes that she sees.

When classifying objects with your child in more regimented activities, and even in day-to-day life, try to use words to compare and contrast objects that are based on their similarities and differences. Size, texture, shape, and overall appearance are all important qualities that should be considered. Always count groups of items you see around the house. Eventually, you'll be ready to count by multiples and explain odd and even numbers.

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Egg Carton Sorter

By Korey Marquez

Identifying colors is a necessary skill that people use every day—for choosing which clothes to wear, reading signs, following traffic signals and describing the surrounding world. Introduce your child to this bright new world of colors using ordinary household objects such as buttons, beads, and marbles. She can group these objects into different sections and learn to recognize their written names using a homemade egg carton sorter. This activity provides an interactive, colorful way for your preschooler to practice color recognition!

What You Need:

• Paper egg carton (half-dozen or full dozen)
• Paint or markers in 6-12 different colors
• Writing pen
• Small, brightly-colored trinkets such as buttons, beads, or glass stones

What You Do:

1. Help your child paint the lid of the egg carton with white paint or cover it with plain paper.
2. Have your child make a small spot of each color on the egg carton lid. Write the name of the color above it with a pen.
3. On the inside of the carton, use paint or markers to designate a color for each as well.
4. Ask your child to sort the trinkets according to color, placing each one in the appropriate well. Start a conversation about the different colors with your child as you sort, asking her to name the color or point to it as she sorts each trinket. Show her the word on the lid that corresponds with each color.

To store the activity for later use, simply close the carton lid with the trinkets inside. The contents will be kept sound and ready for the next color sorting exercise!

Candy Sorter

By Rhonda Cratty

Does your kid have a stash of sweets left over from Halloween that's so massive it seems to rival the candy section at your local corner store? Why not turn that pile of sugary junk food into a learning opportunity? Sorting, counting and categorizing candy has instant appeal to kids. All of those shiny, brightly-colored wrappers and trick-or-treating memories Halloween candy evokes will aid in the learning process. This activity is perfect for children who need practice with everything from counting and classification to description, tallying, and reasoning. Once your kid is all done, he can eat a few pieces as a reward for a job well done!

What You Need:

• Bag of candy
• Paper
• Pencil

What You Do:

1. Help your child clear off a working space and grab some paper and a pencil.
2. Dump an ample amount of candy in the middle of the space.
3. First, have you child count the candy. Have him start by counting by ones, then fives, and then tens. He might want to use tally marks to keep track of how much candy he's counted.
4. After he's finished the counting practice, give your child a little time to decide on three different ways he wants to categorize his candy.
5. Encourage him to describe to you how he's decided to categorize.
6. Help your child write the categories on the piece of paper.
7. Let him sort and categorize his candy.
8. Have your child explain his reasoning behind categorizing the candy the way he did.
9. Finally, have him count, tally and write down how many pieces are in what category.
10. If time permits, let your child discover new ways to categorize and count his candy.

Chalk It Up! Outdoor Classification Activity

By Alicia Danyali

Classification is the way we group items and categorize what we see and experience. Classifying and sorting into groups is also a large part of the first grade math curriculum. The outdoors offers an abundance of learning tools for children, and classifying in the natural world gives your child an added lesson in scientific observation. So, next time you spend some time outdoors with your child, take a view at your surroundings and observe how many ways you could group the objects that you see. You’ll be amazed how many commonalities can be found once you start to classify!

What You Need:

• Sidewalk chalk

What You Do:

1. Bring your chalk along with you as you visit a neighborhood park or your own front yard. Ask your child to name what they see in the park. Then encourage her to group what she sees into categories. Ask your child what title she would give each category (for instance, “Things that are green”, “Things that are bumpy,” etc).
2. Using the chalk, write the category on the ground in a wide open space, whether it’s your driveway or the sidewalk at the park.
3. Now do the same with two or three more categories your child comes up with. If your child is not a reader yet, feel free to make an illustration of the category on the ground alongside the word.
4. Now it's time to sort and find objects that fit the categories listed. You can either place the actual object under the category title (for example, a leaf under the category of “Things that are green) or write the object’s name or draw its picture (for example, a stop sign under the category of “things made of metal”).
5. Once the categories are substantially filled in, look at what objects you found for each group. Which category had the most “things”? Which had the least? Which “things” fit into more than one group?
6. Rewrite the list of objects that appeared on multiple lists and make a Venn diagram (explained in the next step) to take this classification activity to another level.
7. To make a Venn diagram, draw two large circles on the ground that overlaps in the middle. In one circle, avoiding the overlapping part, write the first list of objects, and on the second side of the circle, write the other. Objects that can fit in both categories are written in the overlapping part shared by the two circles.
8. On the walk home, talk about the discoveries that your child made. What outdoor “things” overlapped in two categories? Where these “things” found in nature or man-made? Or both? Encouraging your child to share her observations is a great way to reinforce the exercise and ensure that your child will be a master classifier in no time!

Alicia Danyali, BS Elementary Education, taught primary-level students for four years at the International School of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The last four years of her teaching career, she taught at the Washington International School in Washington, D.C. She recently completed writing a series of children's picture books and is a mother of one young son.