- nonfiction books about seeds
- tray
- variety of seeds
- bulb
- seed
- sort
MA Standards:
Speaking and Listening/SL.PK.MA.1: Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners during daily routines and play.
Language/L.PK.MA.5.a: Demonstrate understanding of concepts by sorting common objects into categories (e.g., sort objects by color, shape, or texture).
Head Start Outcomes:
Language Development/Receptive Language: Attends to language during conversations, songs, stories, or other learning experiences.
Logic and Reasoning/Reasoning and Problem Solving: Classifies, compares, and contrasts objects, events, and experiences.
PreK Learning Guidelines:
Mathematics/Patterns and Relations: Sort, categorize, or classify objects by more than one attribute.
English Language Arts/Language 4: Engage in play experiences that involve naming and sorting common words into various classifications using general and specific language.
Sorting Plant Objects
© Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Early Education and Care (Jennifer Waddell photographer). All rights reserved.
Skill Focus: Compare and Contrast, Sorting and Classifying, Vocabulary
Place the objects children have been collecting outdoors on a tray. Hold up some of the objects and ask children to describe their color, texture, size, and shape. Encourage children to use the words they have been learning (leaves, roots, stem, stalk, seed) as they sort the objects into piles that are the same in some way. For example, have them place all the seeds in one pile and leaves in another. Ask children to tell you what is the same about the objects in each pile.
Adaptation: If you have very young children, you may wish to do this activity with only two categories of objects to sort.
Educator Tip: You may want to have a box to contain all the materials for this Learning Center. You can easily pull the box out and put everything away quickly if you need to transition the area for another learning time.