Social-Emotional Learning

Counters are a great way to encourage toddlers and preschoolers to develop their sorting skills. In this blog we are sharing four quick and easy ways to set up sorting activities with just a few basic materials.

• Set of counters (we used our favorite Learning Resources All About Me Family Counters)
• A4 white paper or card
• Markers (black, red, blue, yellow, green, purple and orange)
• Dot markers (red, blue, yellow, green, purple and orange)
• Ruler

Why is Sorting Important?

Before we get into the details about the activities, it’s important to point out that sorting activities offer a huge host of learning opportunities for toddlers and preschoolers. They may seem simple, but your little one is developing a range of skills when working with counters. For example, their little hands are constantly moving which is helping their fine motor skills to develop (these skills are key for writing as they get older). They will also have the opportunity to explore counting and use number vocabulary, as well as color recognition and vocabulary development. For my 3 year old, sorting activities often also lead to imaginative play, especially when she uses her family counters. 

How to Set Up the Activities

The great thing about making DIY sorting activities is that they take a matter of minutes to set up. Be sure to prep the sorting sheets before inviting your child to take part or else you risk them losing interest waiting for the activity to be ready. Simply use markers to draw out sorting sheets like the ones in the photo. Carefully consider your child’s passions and try to incorporate them into your sorting sheets. My toddler loves putting the family counters into homes, hence I made the houses sheet. She also really enjoys sorting by color and lining up her toys.  

Activity 1: Walk the Line to Meet a Friend

Whenever my little one plays with these counters she always likes to make them be friends. I drew some dotted lines in black marker and put the same kind of counter at each end of the line. I invited her to walk one of the counters along the line to meet their friend. This was great for her fine motor skills as she had to manipulate the counters around the different shapes of the lines. She also demonstrated color vocabulary, chatting away about how the red cat was walking along to meet the yellow cat. There was lots of imagination creating little personalities for the characters in her play too. 

Activity 2: Family Homes

For this one, I drew six different colored houses and then gave each house a number. My daughter enjoyed sorting the correct number of family counters into the correct colored home. There was an element of problem-solving for this one too because the houses were not big enough to fit too many large counters in. She carefully had to figure out the best combination of counters to fit in the house. I was sure to encourage as much talking as she did to support her vocabulary development. Once she had finished sorting, she then wanted to enjoy sending some of the counters to different houses for playdates. 

Activity 3: Colorful Stepping Stones

Dot markers are a great way to quickly add colorful sorting marks to a piece of paper. Here I added different colored dots to the page and told my toddler that they were colorful stepping stones. She added the correct counters onto the stepping stones (she would make them jump on, with ‘boing’ sound effects of course). I intentionally also worked in some numeracy by adding 1-6 dots instead of all the same number of dots for each color. That way my daughter could count as she placed the family counters on the dots and each time she was reaching a different number.  

Activity 4: Color Lines

This one is super simple but is always enjoyed. Just draw outlines in the different colored markers and invite your little one to line up the counters on the correct color of the line. I didn’t give my daughter specific instructions as I wanted her to have some choice. I thought she would try and line them up standing along the line, but she chose to make them lie down. This was another great way to work on her fine motor skills, as well as getting her to think about the size. She realized that the ‘Mummy and Daddy’ counters were much bigger than the ‘baby’ counters. She started to plan which order she would add them in and enjoyed trying to get them perfectly lined up. 

A Few Tips

I always find that my toddler responds better to activities like these when she has some choice. I presented her with the four sorting sheets and let her choose which order to do them in. I also provided her with all of the counters so that she had the freedom to choose which counters to use. If you are doing these with a younger child try to just focus on one simple aspect when sorting, for example color or size. If working with an older child you can make the activity more challenging by combining several aspects of sorting, for example, color and number, or size and color.My final tip is to encourage your child to also enjoy making their own sorting sheets. I always leave out the art supplies to allow my daughter the opportunity to make her own sorting sheet. This encourages engagement, and also introduces more creativity and fine motor skill work as well. Do you have a favorite way to sort counters? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments! Explore other Learning Resources counting toys and counting ideas as well.

No better phrase fits the 2020-2021 school year than "different strokes for different folks"! Whether your family has chosen in-person, virtual or homeschool learning, we know that it wasn't an easy decision for your family. If you have chosen home-schooling for this year, this post may help provide some organization inspiration as your kitchen table becomes the classroom.

Whether you are new to homeschooling or are looking to up your organization skills, we've pulled together a few of our favorite tips that we hope will help you ease into this school year feeling prepared.

Find a consistent spot for homeschool.

Consistency is key! Studies show that having a place dedicated to working helps the brain focus its attention to the task at hand. While it may not be feasible to convert an entire room to homeschooling, creating a workstation at the kitchen or dining room table will help your child focus on schoolwork with limited distraction. The Create-a-Space Bundle is a great all--in-one way to easily store all of your homeschool supplies. The magnetic, sealable pouches can store manipulatives for counting or letter practice while the circular tray can house writing utensils, markers, glue sticks and any other items needed quickly and easily. The circular tray can also be picked up quickly at the end of your school day so your table can serve dinner. Pulling these items out at the beginning of each school day will create a routine and help your child's brain switch from kitchen table to desk.

Color code.

Easily track and locate different work by color coding. Not only will this help make your home school a bit more colorful and fun, it will help both you and your child to organize work by color. The Write & Wipe Pockets are great for being eco-friendly too! Reuse worksheets by sliding them into these dry-erase pockets and fit in with your color coordination. Color coding is also really helpful if you have more than one child learning at home. Having a distinction between work for different children, subjects or days can help you as an educator and parent locate work or items more easily.

Make sure everything has a place.

Just like socks and shoes have a designated spot in your home, so should school work. Rather than letting papers pile up and get lost, figure out a filing system that works for you that ensures everything school-related has a place. Repurposing plastic bins, bookshelves or magazine holders are a great way to get started with figuring out a system using items you already have in your home. Don't forget about items like  dry erase markers and your supplies! This Magnetic Whiteboard Storage Pocket is easy to stick on your dry erase board so that your items don't always end up in your child's supply bin.

Get creative with how you store items.

You don't have to dedicate an entire room in your house to homeschooling to make it work! Think of creative ways to store items that will not be used after your school day ends. Are there places you can hang items, rather than lay them down? What can be folded up and tucked away? Are there items in your house that can be repurposed for storing homeschool material? While it can be daunting to think about, we promise that homeschool materials do not have to take over your life! One recommendation is adding zip ties to the end of pointers, rulers or other items that have a hole to them. Hang these up using magnetic hooks to make them easy to locate while still being out of the way.

Similar to how we all faced quarantine, we're all in this new and likely challenging school year together, even if that looks different to everyone! What are your tips for home school organization?

Sensory Play: Plant a Veggie Patch!

Looking for a way to freshen up your little one’s play food adventures? We had an absolute blast teaming up our Farmer’s Market Color Sorting Set with some homemade ‘soil’ for this awesome hands on vegetable planting activity.

What you need:

• Learning Resources Farmer’s Market Color Sorting Set
• 2 batches of cocoa cloud dough (to make one batch mix 2 cups all purpose flour, ¼ cup cocoa and ¼ cup vegetable oil and then crumble the mixture together by hand)
• Measuring cups
• Spoons
• Muffin tins

Making the Soil

It can be tempting to make the sensory base ahead of time to avoid too much mess but I promise you it is such an enriching part of the activity to get your kiddo involved with the making process. My 3 year old loves getting to measure and pour out the ingredients! We made two batches of the cocoa cloud dough. For each batch we mixed 2 cups of all purpose flour with ¼ cup cocoa powder.

Then we added ¼ cup vegetable oil and stirred it with a spoon. The next part is really important to make sure you get a good consistency. Use your fingertips to squish and crumble the mixture together. My daughter loved doing this and she kept commenting on how soft and smooth it felt.

You want to end up with the cloud dough looking nice and brown. It should hold together when formed into balls, but when you apply pressure or poke it, the mixture will crumble apart.

Let’s get Planting

Once we had our ‘soil’ we picked out our favorite vegetables from the Farmer’s Market set. This was a great opportunity for my daughter to recognize which pieces of the set were fruit and which were vegetables. So much descriptive language and vocabulary being shared! To plant the chosen veggies we had two muffin tins ready, along with a spoon and our cloud dough ‘soil’.

My little one carefully added some ‘soil’ to each of the muffin tin compartments. This was great for fine motor skills and we even linked it to some early numeracy by using simple volume words such as empty, full, more and less.

Next my daughter got to choose which veggies to plant where. You would not believe the delicate thought process that went into choosing each one. She was so careful to make sure that her precious veggies were planted in the middle of the soil, sometimes even making a little hole for them to perch in.

It was fantastic to see my toddler so hands on with the sensory material. It is important to give your children opportunities to build their confidence when using different sensory materials. I love that she confidently touches materials and asks questions / makes descriptive comments about them.

Each time she added a new vegetable she was working her fine and gross motor skills hard. She regularly crossed the midline to place and plant the vegetables which is an important skill for children to develop because it helps to promote the coordination and communication between the two sides of the brain.

Ways to Extend the Play

The main event here was most definitely getting to plant the vegetables in the cloud dough, but there are so many great ways to extend the play. Here’s a few ways we continued to enjoy this set up:

• Numeracy links - simple counting questions such as how many green vegetables did you plant? Or how many vegetables are in each muffin tin?
• What’s missing - with just one muffin tin in front of them, ask your child to carefully study what’s in front of them. Then ask them to close their eyes while you remove one of the vegetables. Can they tell you which one is missing? Let them remove one while you close your eyes too, they will think they are being so sneaky!
• Guess which veggie - a simplified version of Guess Who where your child can ask you questions about the vegetable you have in mind to try and narrow down the answer.
• Re-planting - yup it’s as simple as that, take all the vegetables out, pour out the ‘soil’ and re-plant those vegetables in a different container. You could use a large storage container to make it more like a farmer’s field.

We truly had so much fun with this set up. It allowed for my toddler to be hands on at all times and there are so many great links to numeracy and literacy learning, as well as fine and gross motor development. The great news is that you can store the cloud dough in an airtight container or bag for use months later too. Don’t worry if you don’t have our Farmer’s Market Color Sorting Set, you can enjoy this activity with many different toys such as mini dinos, insects or even making muddy pools for people counters. Happy learning!

Digital technologies and the ever-shifting needs of the modern job market are continuously transforming how children and adults learn, what they prioritize in their curriculums, and how knowledge is acquired and retained in a digital age. While the public school system is unlikely to experience any dramatic shifts in the years to come due to many factors that are out of our control, that doesn’t mean that other trends in the education sector are not on the rise, like instilling a love of STEM from a young age or learning how to leverage technology to learn online.

Now that students are forced to stay at home and honor the lockdown rules, there is an even greater incentive to embrace and adopt the growing trends in order to make at-home learning a breeze and celebrate their success and achievements. With all of that in mind, let’s take a look at the up-and-coming trends that will make a big impact on learning and personal development.

Teaching complementary subjects

When students decide on a career path, it’s usually to specialize in a specific field of study where they will spend their time involved in their work, most likely without making significant contact with scientists and professionals from complementary industries. It can be easy for a young scientist to get so wrapped up in their field of study that they forget that their colleagues from other fields might hold the answers they are trying to get.

This is why cross-field collaboration is so important in the modern scientific world, and why collaboration and multi-disciplinary science will become more commonplace in the future. One of the biggest problem of modern scientific communities, for example, is that there is not enough collaboration. This, for example, means that a molecular biologist might spend years trying to make an experiment work, having no idea that a physicist or a geneticist might be able to uncover the process that will get them there. This is a problem that collaboration and multi-disciplinary science can fix.

Inspiring learning from a younger age

Aside from inspiring young students to take an interest in multiple subjects and the scientific field, and aside from teaching them the importance of inter-disciplinary collaboration, it’s also important to note that education of the future will start from a progressively younger age. Even as we speak scientists from around the world are trying to uncover the secrets of how young children adopt and retain information and how they develop their interests and inclinations.

As the child grows and begins to explore the world around them, it will be up to the professionals and the parents to use engaging methods like using this fun geometric heart STEM challenge to educate young children and inspire them to become passionate about learning from a very young age.

Online learning is blossoming quickly

One of the biggest trends that is already transforming the way we learn and retain information is online learning, or better known in the digital world as eLearning. Even though individuals and freelancers are popularizing this trend, it is the innovative and professional eLearning hubs like Clutch Prep that are leading the entire industry forward with vast learning resources, engaging videos and curriculums that complement the textbooks that students use in school.

The key here is to create a fun and engaging online learning environment that will make adopting and retaining information easier, while inspiring passion and love for lifelong learning. What’s more, online learning platforms allow students to broaden their interests and delve deeper into the subject matter, which will ultimately inspire them to build a thriving and well-rounded career.

Using virtual reality for learning

Much like eLearning is making education fun and rewarding, virtual reality is making the modern learning environment more engaging for the tech-savvy student. VR headsets are nowadays becoming more affordable, and students are able to learn in a fully-digital environment, allowing teachers to take them on grand learning adventures without ever leaving the classroom.

Students will soon have the ability to learn about the solar system by traveling through space in a VR spaceship, or to explore the intricacies of the human body by shrinking down to the size of a blood cell. VR technology can serve many a purpose, and even help the youngest among us to learn coding and various computer sciences with ease.

Weaving artificial intelligence into the process

Finally, artificial intelligence is making a big impact on education as we speak, and it might not get adopted on a grand scale for some time, it will still disrupt and ultimately change the way teachers communicate knowledge to their students. Introducing AI-driven technologies into the classroom will improve scoring, help teachers discover the student’s pain points and knowledge gaps, and it will help them optimize the entire curriculum for maximum retention and student engagement.

Wrapping up

The education sector is always evolving with technological innovation, but it’s also important to note how students are adopting new trends at home and in the classroom. Be sure to use these insights to gain a better understanding of the course that education is taking, and how your children can use these trends to one day become successful, thriving adults.

We're living through an unprecedented moment in history right now. People are sick, our lives are upended, and our communities are being tested like never before. It's easy to feel overwhelmed at a time like this, but it's also easy to take a minute to find your own personal bright side. Below, you'll find a few tips that we're employing to stay positive while dealing with the challenges we face.  

Stick to a Schedule

Even when you're working and learning from home, it's important to maintain a predictable schedule, preferably one that looks as much like your normal routine as possible. That means getting up and going to bed at the usual hours, starting and stopping work at the same times each day, and honoring things like breaks and mealtimes the same way you would if you were out of the house. This predictability helps this unfamiliar situation feel a little less chaotic, and will help you and your kids maintain the good behaviors you've developed at work and school without backsliding.

Celebrate the Good Stuff

When you're dealing with excess stress and change, it can be really easy to overlook the things that are going well. Our team at Learning Resources has been meeting each day via video conference, and the first thing we do on every call is share one positive or exciting thing that happened during the previous day. Whether it's a movie we watched or a project we finished, it's an excellent way to focus ourselves on the positive things that remain despite the craziness. Try it with your family, and you'll be surprised at how much goodness you'll uncover.  

Plan Special Occasions

Just because there aren't any major holidays on the calendar for a while doesn't mean you can't find an excuse to celebrate. If you're stuck inside for a while, we recommend planning special occasions of your own that give you a little something extra to look forward to throughout the day. It may be something as simple as a favorite home-cooked meal or game night, or as elaborate as a made-up holiday of your own; whatever shape it takes, these little treats help your family buy in and come together during a difficult time (Need inspiration? Check out National Today for fun ideas!) 

Start a Family Project

With everyone home for an extended period of time, families have a unique opportunity to turn this downtime into something memorable. Maybe it's a scrapbook, photo album, journal, or art project that everyone contributes to. Maybe it's a new vegetable garden for the backyard. Maybe it's something as simple as quick daily vlogs that capture your lives in the moment. Whatever the case, these family-level projects give you the chance to build new skills, engage with your kids, and create something that you can look back on in the years to come. 

Make Time for Me Time

Look, we get it: togetherness can be stressful, even under normal circumstances. With everyone under the same roof for an extended period of time, it's even more important to carve out some alone time for every member of the family. That can take many different shapes: maybe you can designate a room in your house that family members can reserve for solo activities, or maybe you can designate a quiet hour every day where everyone works on their own independent projects. Whatever shape your me time takes, it'll help you stay refreshed and maintain your sense of self while everyone's together. 

Get Outside

It's finally spring, which means that nature is getting ready to put on a green, flower-filled show. That's why it's so vital to remember your outdoor options as you pass your time at home. As the weeks go by, your backyard will likely become a wonderland of bugs, critters, and new plant life that's worth explore (or just viewing with a cup of coffee from the porch). Don't have a backyard? Take a walk through your neighborhood. As long as you maintain proper social distancing, these little trips outside your home will reconnect your with the world at large and help you take in some bright springtime life all at the same time. 

At Learning Resources, we’re here to help you make the best of this challenging time. Stay safe and healthy, and check back with our blog for more tips and learning ideas as the situation unfolds.