Children love to categorize their world. As they learn new vocabulary, new places and new things, they enjoy adding this new knowledge to their existing database.

A simple but effective activity to practice categorization is sorting! Montessori calls it ‘isolating one difficulty’ which means sorting according to shape, color, or texture, but never a combination of the three.

In the video, you’ll see how to set up a nice sorting by color activity. Start with a big bowl of assorted colors of pom poms.

Provide as many smaller dishes as needed for the number of different colors you have. For example, if there are four colors in your big bowl, provide four smaller bowls to sort the pom poms into.

Next, let your child get to work! Sort all of the pom poms, one by one, into the smaller bowls. When completed, practice naming the colors or counting the pom poms of each color!

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