Finally!
Do you ever feel like there is that one topic that you just can't seem to figure out? How can I make this topic really fun (but not have to spend hours prepping?!) Now, don't get me wrong I often spend hours planning and prepping but for some reason whenever it came to teaching about sorting and organizing I had the hardest time getting excited about my lessons...until now! I think I have finally "Sorted It All Out!!" and boy, could I not be more excited to finally have landed on this lesson!
Some of our sorting and organizing activities...
Guess My Sort: I started out by randomly choosing a couple of students to come up to the classroom. Then I told the class: I choose these students to come up here because I sorted them by something that they all have in similarity. When a person sorts things, that means they group items together after finding something that all of the items have in common. I then asked the students to guess how I sorted the students that came up to the carpet from the people (the color of their shirt), then I sorted another group (by type - all girls), then a 3rd group (all similar height - this was the hardest one! Students found so many sorts which was great because I said yes you are right that is a sort, but that is not what my brain was thinking when I sorted them), and finally I told the students to make a shape, any shape with their hands, & then I brought the kids up based on that - (by shape).
**As we did this, we created an anchor chart**
Lucky Charms - Each child got a scoop of lucky charms
and was told to sort them once. Then we discussed the sorts we found. Then they had to sort them a 2nd way. Again, we shared.
This was absolutely a class favorite (and a favorite for me since it required very little prep!!)!!
One other thing I loved about this activity was that it allowed us to talk about what we can learn from our sorts. For example: we discovered that from our sorts, we knew that we had more cereal than marshmallows and why that is significant to know.
3 Little Firefighters: While they ate their Lucky Charms, we read this sorting story and talked about the sorts while reading.
