Sorting Materials From Lakeshore

My students know it....my family knows it...and my fiancé knows it...Lakeshore is one of my FAVORITE places to shop!  My students see the word "Lakeshore" on so many materials that they have asked me where the store is so they can bring their parents.  Now, Lakeshore is not necessarily the cheapest place to shop, but their materials are high quality and so many are hands-on!  I also don't usually buy these materials myself...I use www.donorschoose.org to write grants for the materials!  Donorschoose is a classroom saver!  Without them, my classroom shelves would be completely bare!  But anyways, enough on that for today...on to this great sorting resource!

This product comes in 3 themes...farm sorting, bug sorting, and vehicle sorting (I, of course, needed all three!).  They are $19.99 each and $55 for the set.  Check out the link here to Lakeshore's site.  The box comes with 5 cards depicting different ways the manipulatives can be sorted.  For the farm version you can have the kids sort by color, size, type of fur, beak vs. mouth, or flying vs. walking.

 The card gets places in the sorting container (it slides in nicely) and the kids are ready to sort.

Here's the finished product!  We currently use these in small, teacher-led groups.  They could also be used as centers or as work station tasks.  In the beginning of the year, I used these to work on turn taking (before introducing more traditional games) with some of my new students.  I just gave out one manipulative at a time and the other students had to wait patiently while their classmate sorted it correctly (this was tough for some of my little speedsters who wanted to do the work for their peers!).