On a tuff tray, the children at RisingOaks Early Learning | St. Patrick were presented with four large shapes drawn on a piece of paper covering the whole tray. There was a heart, triangle, circle, and square, as well as some small foam shapes that matched the large ones. They were not asked to do anything with it, but instead on their own they decided that they were going to sort the foam shapes, saying “We need to sort the shapes!”.

They placed all the hearts inside the large drawn one, and did so with the other three shapes. From there they decided to take it a step further and sort the shapes in each category into the same colour groups as well, “Let’s sort the colours!” we heard one child say to another. We then observed them putting them into rainbow order as well!

After all the sorting, they looked at the shapes and noticed that there were more of some than there were of others. They noted “There’s the most squares.”, and then counted how many there were, we counted 23 squares in total! The children participating in this activity were engaged with it for a while, and seemed to love sorting and matching the shapes. This activity was a great way for them to build their categorizing, shape and colour recognition, and team work skills!