Sorting Activity- "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom"

The other day during Cooper's afternoon nap, I took Penelope out back to do some painting on a large poster board. We didn't have a direction, so we took a bunch of supplies outside with us to explore! As we were painting, I started to paint some trees. I then eyed the big zip-lock bag full of stickers. We could make a letter tree! We started to search through a very big zip-lock bag full of foam stickers looking for letters. Every letter we found, we stuck on the letter tree. Looking at the pictures Penelope took of the final product, I thought of the fabulous book, "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" by Bill Martin! 

*I had always seen  many different bulletin boards around school at the beginning of the year with the "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" theme. They were so cute but I must admit I had never read the book! That is, until Penelope came around. When she turned 1, the book was her absolute favorite! We would read her the book so many times, that neither myself nor my husband needed to look at the words in order to read it correctly.

             Penelope and Derek enjoying the book together! 

What a fabulous book for introducing and working on the alphabet with young learners! If you haven't read it, please make sure to grab it at the library the next time you are there. :)

                  OK, back to our art project! 

We didn't stop at the letter tree!  Looking at all of the neat supplies we had on the deck,I painted another tree, and we then searched for numbers in this big bag. Each number that we found we placed on the new tree, the number tree. 

At this point, I had her searching and sorting numbers and letters and she didn't even realize the wonderful learning that was taking place! (We had to head inside because of the heat, but I was then able to tape the poster on the door, making it easier for her to see the distinction between the trees.)

Finally, I painted one last tree because I noticed that my big zip-lock had three types of foam stickers; letters, numbers and shapes. 

Our third and final tree was a shape tree. Penelope was now searching through the bag looking for shapes, numbers, and letters. Once she found them, she was peeling the back of them, and sorting them onto the correct tree. 

 (As you can see I didn't have many shape stickers- maybe you could have students graph the number of "leaves" on each tree, since they most likely won't all have the same number of stickers!)

              

Letter Recognition CHECK
Number Recognition CHECK
Shape Recognition CHECK
Sorting CHECK
                          Classroom Connect
You can do this same project in the classroom! Children can work in teams or alone at a center to create these various trees. Push them a little deeper to make words using the letters in their letter tree, come up with math problems using numbers in their number tree or to create patterns using the shapes in their shape tree. 


(c) Susan Fleishman Haese 2015