She sells sea shells........for $3

We recently checked this book out from the library, we all really liked it. The little mouse's mom says he has too many things, and that he needs to sort through them and put them away! Then the mouse takes you through his process of sorting by color, size, shape, and more. It's a fun book.

Jefferson kept talking about sorting something after reading the book, but we never did. Until I was at the thrift store and saw a huge jar of shells for $3. Of course we bought them. And what better a thing to do with these shells than to SORT them! We took all of them out and I let the boys take a good look at all of them. Then I suggested we sort them just like the mouse sorted in his book. It was cute to see that they actually understood the concept, and cuter to hear their descriptions of the shells. I labeled the groupings as they were described by the boys.

First they were divided between the shells that were "round with ridges" (okay, the ridges word was mine, but that's what he meant), those that were "twisting", and "different looking" shells.

Then I asked them to separate those groups even further. Grant split the "round with ridges" shells into "dark" and "white." A few of the white shells ended up in the dark pile, but overall I think he did a pretty awesome job!Jefferson split the "twisting" shells into "are smooth" and "have pokeys"

I just love watching their little minds work things out.

There was one casualty... the star fish lost a few of his parts! But overall, a fun activity.... now what to do with those shells, hmmm.