Sorting and Comparing

If you're making the flowers from our free Coloring Club with your children, here is an idea for math - use them in a sorting and comparing lesson. 

Sorting, classifying and comparing - along with ordering and making patterns are essential for early work in number.

Mini Lesson: Let's Sort the Garden

You need:

a flower made my each student - let them choose 1 from the 4 they made

Activities:

• tell the students that together they will sort flowers from the class garden
• have all the flowers placed in a central place for all students to view (the middle of a circle of seated students on the floor will work well)
• ask students for suggestions on how the flowers could be sorted - e.g. color (pink/not pink), shape (circle/not circle), flowers colored in pencils/crayons, flowers with a yellow center/ not yellow center
• using some of the suggested sorting categories, facilitate a sorting of the flowers - use some large sheets of paper, hoops or trays to place the different groups
• discuss the sorting as the lesson progresses and help students understand that their flower has multiple attributes and can be a part of different groups - e.g. it is pink, round and colored in crayon
• once the flowers are sorted use the opportunity to compare the groups - there are more pink flowers than other flowers, there are fewer circle flowers than tulips
• as the week progresses look for way to encourage your learners to describe objects based on their attributes and sort objects into groups

Shape Garden

Following the sorting with flowers, you make like to encourage your students to make repeating patterns with the flowers or have your class garden display show a pattern.

Provide pattern or attribute blocks to your students and let them independently sort like in the whole class mini lesson. After this a fun activity is to let them take a scoop of blocks and sort them.