Today Travis took a break from tracing the alphabet and focused instead on summer math skills: counting and sorting.

There are so many ways to approach this, and you can tailor it to fit what’s in your home! First up, we pulled out a collection of his toy cars, and I asked him to sort them in two ways. He wanted a quick reminder on what it means to sort, i.e. grouping things by a common characteristic. The first category he came up with was color. Our red pile was the biggest.

I helped him look for a different way to sort this same set of cars and he settled on size. I thought he would do big and small, but he made sure even to include a medium pile!

Next we went through our craft bin to find things to sort. Foam stickers in fun sports shapes were a perfect find! At first, I just gave him the pile and set him the task of sorting them (keeping those fingers busy while I prepped dinner).

This proved to be a little too open-ended, so I gave him two options: sorting the balls by sport or by color. He opted for sport, and soon was off and running. At the end, we wondered: which pile had the most? He proudly counted out 14 soccer balls, but then loved discovering that there were even more footballs – 15!

Another great time for sorting is during clean-up! If your house is anything like ours, the Lego sets are all mixed together and a constant mess. I purchased a set of craft bins to sort the Legos by color, which meant Travis was doing “math” while helping me… and didn’t even realize it was a chore.

The possibilities are almost endless. Have your child count out and then sort their markers or crayons.

Or they can sort the coins in your wallet by denomination.

Or just for fun, make a busy box of different dried pasta shapes and have your child sort and then count out piles of each. Either way, counting and sorting are the perfect math activity to prevent the summer slide.