Sorting It Out

In my Kindergarten classroom we are in the thick of learning how to sort items according to shape, colour, and size.  Here are a couple of ideas to make sorting tasks less of a task and more of an adventure!


Smartie Sorting
With Halloween just around the corner it's easy to get your hands on mini boxes of chocolate Smartie candies.  My intention for the Smartie Sorting activity is to have each student sort the candies into 3 colour groups and (with a glance) decide which group is biggest and which is smallest.  To prepare for the activity the night before, I open all of the boxes of Smarties and ensure that each little box has only 3 different colours of candies and that one colour group is obviously bigger and one is obviously smaller.  (This may appear to be a lot of work but the richness of the activity warrants a little extra prep time before things get rolling in class... and with a little glue at the top of each previously opened box, no one even realizes that the boxes have been 'tampered' with!).  

An anonymous no-faced student checks to see which
colour group is the largest.

Once the children have physically sorted their Smarties into three colour groups, each child draws a representation of their findings on a simple bar graph.  
Students are asked to take their boxes of Smarties home to show their parents what they did in math class that day (and eat the candies if they so wish).


An Exploding Button Machine!
What happens when the Button Machine in a fashion factory explodes and a zany (and extremely beautiful) fashion designer enlists the help of young children to sort and reorganize the mess?  This idea was expanded from the Maximizing Kindergarten Math teachers resource that I helped to develop.  And, as always, I found a way to take it a step further and add a little performance art as well!  Check out the video clip below:

A large cardboard box containing a number of plastic baggies filled with mixed up buttons is delivered to the classroom for the children to sort.  Sorting buttons presents many opportunities for little mathematicians to identify numerous ways to sort (colour, number of holes, shape, size, etc.) and it is quite surprising to see how serious they are in helping poor (but extremely beautiful) Donnatella with her most recent misadventure in the factory.