Did you know….sorting is an important foundational maths skill? Whist sorting may seem a simple enough concept it can take a while for young children to fully grasp this skill.

For this activity you will need:

Coloured containers to sort into. We made slits in the lids so that we could add an extra fine-motor element here, but depending on what kind of colour objects you are sorting, you may prefer open containers.

Use any small coloured objects such as pompoms, buttons, crayons, lego, etc for your child to sort.

You can also use tongs or tweezers to sort with, which adds another wonderful fine-motor element.

After sorting the colours into the boxes, Kamali decided to make rows and counted them to see which colour had the most – developing one-to-one correspondence and quantity comparisons. She has also started to actively explore the concept of addition as seen in the video below.

Then she piled them into their coloured piles on top of the lids, slotted them back into their boxes and then played a trick by sorting the colours into different colour boxes and asking us to guess which colour was inside…..needless to say this activity has many ways to explore and develop early maths skills!

If your child is under 3 you can use bigger containers such as buckets and larger objects to sort such as balls or bean bags.