All Sorts of Sorts

Hi Y’all!  We are so sad gearing up for school to start again!  We have been setting up the classrooms and unpacking all of our “stuff”.  Every year when we unpack we find treasures that can be repurposed for our students.  This year we found our plastic divided dish from the dollar store sorting tray and came up with a few ways to use it.

As you can see we added tongs for the children to use as they manipulate the various items that we will put in the sorting tray.  By using the tongs (or a strawberry huller) they are developing and strengthening their pincher muscles that will lead to a better pencil grasp and legible handwriting.

 The first item for sorting are colored pom poms (from the dollar store of course).  The children sort the pom poms by color or size or texture.

The next  item are the ever popular unifix cubes (we have sacks of these!)  We put a colored dot in each section to denote the color that goes in it.

We kept thinking of different kinds of sorts and came up with an adaptation of the sort our kids like best – letters.  You can see that we added sticky notes to each section – one section for letters with vertical lines, one section for diagonal lines, one section for curved lines and the last section for letters with circles.

Finally our brains were out of ideas (and we were out of erasers).  So it’s on to unpacking the rest of our boxes to see what other treasures we can find.