Last week we learned all about sorting. We learned how we could sort differnet objects. We also learned how to decide if objects belonged together in a group. As a culmination of all of the things that we learned, we read the story Grandma's Button Box. In this story, the grandchildren accidentally spill all of Grandma's buttons and try to figure out how to put them back into the button box exactly like she had them. They try many different ways to get them just perfect. The best part of the story is when Grandma comes home and tells them she didn't have them sorted at all! The kids went through all of that for nothing! It is a very cute story and a wonderful way to integrate language arts into math. I love reading the story and then re-creating it in our classroom.
After reading the story, we reviewed what it means to sort. Sorting is putting things with simliar traits together. Then we practiced sorting our own buttons! Each student was given a cup with a random sampling of buttons in it-- many different shapes, sizes, and colors.
We brainstormed some of the ways that we had sorted over the week and then sorted our buttons the same way. 
First, we sorted by size.
Then we sorted by shape.
Finally, we sorted by color.
Then a few really crafty kids came up with the idea to sort by number of holes in the button!
After we finished as a group, I had the children pour all of their buttons out again and sort them any way that they liked to sort and explain to me how they sorted them. This shows me that not only are they able to sort the objects, they are able to classify them into a group and explain the sorting rule. This was a great activity to wrap up our unit on sorting and explore the different ways that groups of objects can be sorted. It was also a lot of fun!
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