Snack sorting! It’s an interesting way to involve students in classifying and, while sitting together to eat, there is time to talk about why certain groupings were chosen. Children might sort by shape, create an ABAB pattern, and count the number of each snack shape.
Classification is the theme for the March 2009 issue of Science and Children
I was especially interested in the performance standard scale for the process of classification developed by a group of first-grade teachers in the Coast Metro school districts of British Columbia, Canada (see “Classifying Classification”, pgs. 25-29). The scale details the skills and behavior that may be seen in first graders as they classify and answer these questions:
How are these the same? How are they different? Is there another way you can sort theses into groups? Where would you place this new item in your system? Explain.
The teachers put classification skills on a continuum from Matching, to Sorting, to Categorizing, to Interpreting, “to help them describe how students move through different levels of classification tasks.”
I’m eager to apply this model to the next classification task I introduce in my teaching, and improve the sequence of classifying tasks we work on next year.
Peggy