Ornament Sort and Match

Can we say Christmas!!  Ah yes.  It's such a fun time of the year and the children are most likely so excited, but going stir crazy in the house due to colder weather.  Fortunately, we've been blessed with decent weather and my kiddos have gotten outside for at least a few minutes a day, but somehow they are still getting into everything with all the decorations sitting around.  This year, I purchased an extra set of ornaments for them to play with thinking they'd leave mine alone.  While they were excited to see and play with them, they still mess with my ornaments, but not nearly as much as they probably would.

All you really need is shatterproof ornaments of different colors.  I chose three colors, but you can choose as many as you wish.  Mine are also shiny and matte which was a plus!

First, we started with the box of ornaments and we talked about the color, the shape, and the textures.  After that, I let them go to work.  They started placing them in piles according to their colors.

Once there were multiple ornaments in each pile, they started placing them into rows.

I took the opportunity to discuss what "rows" are and we then proceeded to count how many were in each row.

Finally, we sorted them according to their textures.  They really enjoyed looking at their reflections in the shiny ornaments.  They prefer the shiny ornaments to the matte. :-)

This is a quick and simple activity for your kiddos that can keep them busy and hopefully distracted from the Christmas bustle!

Paper Clip Color Sort

This is a fun, yet unique way of helping children learn 6 basic colors, as well as learning how to improve their eye-hand coordination.  In teacher terms, the paper clips serve as an educational manipulative that helps children identify colors, as well as place a small item onto the coordinating color.  This is a quick activity that you can throw together that will get kiddos' learning colors in no time!

While children are sorting their colors, they will be learning more about:

• Eye-hand coordination
• How to manipulate smaller objects - fine motor skills
• Counting and numbers
• Colors
• Language such as; in a row, line up, side by side, horizontal

Simple materials that you will need are:

• Colored paper clips

• Colored pieces of paper - mine are white, pink, red, yellow, blue, & green to coordinate with the colored paper clips.  If you want them to last longer, you can buy laminate sheets to coat the papers to make them stronger

First, I gave the kiddos the colored cards and told them to place them in a row, side by side.  I, as well, did this so they could have a role model.  There was a bit of a struggle with it, but they got it with a little assistance.  We also talked about the different colors.

After the colored row was made, I then handed them a handful of colored clips and they basically went to town.  They didn't even wait for me to give them instructions.  If I were to give them the instructions prior to, I'd ask them to place the colored clip on the matching paper.

Not sure if you remember, but I have boy/girl twins.  It's hard NOT to compare them, but I still do at times.  My daughter is THE KNOW IT ALL.  She always has an answer to everything and she's normally correct.  My son struggles a bit, mixes his colors up, but he's not far behind her.  This activity was mostly dedicated for him to practice his colors.  He did a great job at matching, but still needs a bit of work at identifying!

Once they were finished sorting and matching, we did some counting of how many clips were on our colored paper.  I also tried to show them how to "clip" the paper clip onto the paper.  This activity is an extension of the sorting activity and my kiddos did struggle with this, but we'll keep on practicing!

Enjoy!