Quiet Sorting

Beads are amazing.  I remembered that I had this big bag of them and pulled them out the other day to play a sorting game with my two year old.  He had been trying to get up on the stools with the bigger boys, so I pulled him aside to do something special with him and let the older boys continue playing.

As he picked up a bead, I'd tell him the color.  Then we would put it in a muffin space.  Pretty soon, Treyton was on a roll sorting the beads by color and jabbering about the shapes (balls, dolphins, lions, various fruit, loop beads, etc.)

Now a week later, he is shouting out his colors (in his own, mostly incoherent way) and sorting without my help, although I do still supervise since he's prone to throwing beads as if they were baseballs...

This was also a great activity to develop the pincer grasp which is an essential fine-motor skill needed for holding a pencil properly.  This is important "because the more these muscles are tuned, the easier it will be for the child to learn to write."  For more, read here.

But Treyton wasn't the only one fascinated with the beads.  Both of my bigger boys ended up begging to play with them and peacefully sorted beads for almost an hour.  (Hurray, time to straighten up the kitchen!)

Since they have mastery of colors, we could also use them to naturally go over concepts like:

more than/less then

(Are there more red beads or blue beads?)

simple addition

(If Xander has __ green beads and Keegan has __ green beads, how many would you have if you combined them?)

subtraction

(You had 15 beads, but Treyton just swiped 6 of them, how many do you have left?)

different shades of the same main color

living vs non living

(ball-shaped beads vs. animal/plant shaped beads)

playing I-Spy 

independant exploration/play

This activity could not have come at a better time since we are getting set to head into super hot weather soon!