sort it out

My little learners working on classifying and categorizing

The list of things that kindergarteners (rather, all students) need to learn is incredibly long. As a teacher, this means that I need to find innovative ways for the students to make connections to the material that can sometimes be a bit dry. I follow the curriculum laid out by the school district and use the basic materials that they tell me to, but I also try to build upon those basics so that the students aren't spending all of their time listening to lecture and doing worksheets.

This week, our focus in language arts is classifying and categorizing. In layman's terms, we're sorting. However, I need to stress this academic language, which confuses the heck out of their five (and now six) year old brains. I'll get to add to the confusion later this year when we change the academic language to compare and contrast. What it all comes down to though is we are sorting the heck out of things.

Today I broke out my sorting plates (which I purchased for very little at the Jumble Shop while visiting the mister's family in Nebraska last year) and seashells (given to my by my friend Emily). The more advanced students were able to decide how they would sort the shells into groups. My on level group sorted their shells by size. My students that still struggle a bit did some guided sorting by color (I would choose a color and demonstrate how to make a group, then they would follow suit). It was a fantastic hands on activity followed up by a worksheet that is somewhat similar to that which we will do for our weekly test tomorrow. It seemed to go well. Tomorrow we'll see just how well the connection stuck.