Kindergarten Preschool Toddler
MathFallPrintables
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Learning to sort and group objects based on various attributes is an incredibly important skill for preschoolers to learn.
Fortunately, it’s a skill that young children will often work on on their own without even realizing it.
Whether they’re grouping their toys by color or matching up different types of animal figurines, they’re working on those sorting skills!
But this fall, you can make that sorting practice a little more intentional with this apple basket size sorting activity!
Why is learning to sort important?
Learning to sort is an incredibly important skill for toddlers and preschoolers.
Sorting teaches them to look at the similarities and differences of items and teaches them to categorize those items into different groups.
It creates the foundation on which the rest of their mathematical skills will build on.
It helps develop their reasoning and thinking skills and lays the ground work for more advanced problem solving skills.
It helps develop the ability to begin identifying patterns and all of these will be necessary in the future as they move on to more complex mathematical concepts.
But math problems aren’t the only reason children need to learn to sort.
Sorting is a skill that they’ll utilize throughout their lives on a daily basis.
Everyday things that we don’t really think about like sorting clothes for laundry day, organizing a closet, and going through the mail all require the ability to sort, group, and categorize.
Thankfully, there are so many fun sorting activities for preschoolers out there to help you practice, including this apple basket size sorting activity!
Sorting Apples by Size
This activity is absolutely perfect for fall, especially if you have an apple theme planned, and will have your preschoolers working on sorting by size.
They’ll be able to see three different sized apple baskets, all with size words written on them so that they can begin to associate the sizes with the words small, medium, and large.
All you need to do to prep this apple size sorting activity for your preschoolers is print the pages off, cut the pieces out, and run them through your laminator.
Your students are going to have a blast sorting all of the different sized apples into the correct baskets in your math center, but if you’d like to mix things up a bit, try creating an apple tree out of butcher paper on your wall that your students will need to pick the apples from before they can sort them.
You can attach the apples to the tree using Velcro dots or even sticky tack as long as you’re monitoring your students while it’s out.
Once all of the apples have been picked, they’ll just sort them into the appropriate buckets.
