April 8: Using household items to work on matching and sorting skills

I've been talking with some of you lately about how to use household items to work on matching or sorting skills. We work on these skills with our students a lot at school. These are great skills that are easily transferable to the work place one day (think of jobs that may involve sorting cutlery, stocking shelves, etc.). I wanted to share some photos of ideas I've found that you could try at home:

Use a deck of cards to have your child sort a pile of black and a pile of red. To make it more challenging, they could sort by number, put in numerical order, or even sort by suit afterwards!

Use coloured paper to cut into small pieces and have your child sort the pieces onto the corresponding coloured mats. This could also be made into a sort by shape task!

Have your child sort some beans by colour.

Use random household objects to sort by colour on plates.  

Use letters from alphabet puzzles to make a sort by letter activity. 

A more challenging literacy sorting activity could be sorting objects/toys into baskets labelled with their beginning sound/letter.

Use fridge magnet letters to sort by colour. This could also work as a sorting by uppercase or lowercase letter task.

As a numeracy challenge, use beans or other food items to count out the correct number of objects into the corresponding numbered bowls.

Muffin tins also work great to sort objects like pompoms by colour. 

Have your child sort socks by colour (and as an additional skill, fold/roll them!), sort cutlery, match lids to the corresponding Tupperware containers, and use ice cube trays to sort buttons by colour.