Sorting Beans! {12 Days of Sensory Play}
Day 5 – Sorting with Beans
What could be more fun than a barrel of monkeys? Just maybe, a bag of beans! This 15-bean soup is perfect for a great variety. {And as long as you’re careful, you can be resourceful and eat them afterward in a delicious ham soup!}
Besides the fun feel of playing with them, let’s think of all the educational benefits from a $2 bag of beans! **CAUTION: Choking hazard; do not let young children put beans into their mouth.**
- COLOR – Sort by colors
- SIZE – Sort by size
- COMPARISON – Big, bigger, biggest; small, smaller, smallest.
- SOUND – Listen to the sounds the different beans make as you drop them into a metal muffin tin
- FINE MOTOR SKILLS – Picking up and sorting into bowls or ice-cube trays. You could also use spoons or small measuring cups for added variety and working on things like pouring from one to another.
- MATH – Addition and subtraction for the preschool or kindergarten age
- ART – Make a picture using the different colored beans – a rainbow would be a simple one to do. You could also use Elmer’s glue to glue the beans to a piece of card stock so your masterpiece lasts a little longer!
Toddlers might be less interested in sorting, and more into taking-big-handfuls-of-beans play… *sigh* He could mess up my neat piles faster than I could sort them, BUT he did like putting beans into all the little sections of the muffin tin and ice-cube tray. I think that is as much sorting as it gets at this age!
Now you have your school activity AND your dinner plan for the day!
