Sorting It Out At the Farmers Market

Today Vada and I worked on the Alphabet. how do you do such a thing with a two year old? Well, today her and I sat on our living room floor and went through flash cards. Yes, she is a busy bodied little girl but she is also a sponge and I can keep her attention for quite awhile. So we went through the flash cards and then we sang and danced to the Alphabet song sung by no other than yours truly. Its pretty simple stuff here.

After working on the alphabet we broke out the Farmer's Market Sorting Set by my favorite place to buy toys, Learning Resources. My parents ordered it for her for her birthday. Such. a. perfect. gift! The suggested age is 3+ but it's completely safe with supervision and there are only a couple of smaller pieces to be concerned with in the first place.

Since this was our first time using the set I let Vada explore the majority of the pieces while I took everything out of their bags and put the color label stickers on the baskets.

There are five pieces of fruits and vegetables for each color and five colors total.

I started Vada off with one color, red and I just asked her to put the red ______ into the basket. After she did all five of the red foods I added a second basket, leaving the red next to the new one.

With the second basket (purple), I repeated the task that I had origanally gave to her with the red basket.

Finally I added a third basket (orange). The task was still the same as the first two baskets, nothing had changed other than the color and number of baskets sitting in front of her. I wanted her to hear me speak the name of the fruit or vegetable as well as its color and then I wanted her to be able to pay attention to the task that I gave her and to identify the difference in color. Well, that was my initial goal. Not being a teacher or having any real clue as to what I was doing, I think that it went really well. Vada is great at listening and visually paying attention. What I saw today was not Vada knowing her colors but her watching where I was pointing to and listening to what I was telling her to do. When I would point at a basket asking Vada to place the object that she was holding into the basket, she knew what I was talking about, even if she didn't know what exactly it was that she was holding. And to me, that's a great place to start!

After the third basket Vada had had enough color sorting and because I want this to be a fun and positive experiences I was fine with that! I did however through in a final learning lesson when I brought out the ziplock and asked Vada to help me pick up. not only was I teaching her to clean up and put things into something, as she was grabbing a fruit or vegetable I would say "Vada, you grabbed an purple onion, that's a vegetable. Thank you  for helping Mommy pick up, now can you please pick up another?" Oh yes, we are working on manners too! Isn't it funny how everything we do we teach? This all probably sounds so simple to everyone but to Vada, or any toddler, this is work and is a learning experience. It kind of amazes me. Anyway, I have found a lot of great learning ideas and I have had so many responses to my request for more ideas. Thank you to everyone who has shared their thoughts and ideas with me, these past two weeks have been full of fun learning activities!

And last but not least, thank you to my parents Augie and Suzan for this great learning toy as well as the other two that you sent for Vada! They will be well used and are greatly appreciated! We love you !