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Monday, September 17, 2012

Gathering Collections for Sorting

Last week I talked about wanting to provide more opportunities to sort and classify different collections in my preschool classroom.

This weekend (after I wrote that) I set out to see what kind of "Collections" I could find at two of my favorite selling venues:  Yard Sales and Target.

It actually turned out to be a rather slow yard sale day, despite the fact that the weather was fairly nice, and the fact that yard sales happen here in my area year-round.  However, as I drove around I noticed there were lots of soccer games going on at all the local schools, so I figure lots of people were out cheering for their children instead of selling their things.

I did manage to find one nice item in the form of a game.  I actually think board games are one of the best places to find odd item collections, because you can usually find them very cheap and they usually have very interesting game tokens.  Plus, even if some the tokens are missing it makes it even more of a bargain, but still valuable for you. On Saturday I found this game:


It came with all sorts of plastic tools:


Later that day I went to Target to check out the newest Dollar Spot items.  I was thrilled to find these:





They were $2.50 each and each had either 120 or 150 pieces in each box.  I might use them for Sorting Collections, for Sensory Bins, or as tokens for Grid Games.

I also found these bags of erasers for $1.00:




They also had cute ghost and skeleton erasers, but I skipped over those this time.

I also found these wonderful sorting containers for $1.00, as well.


So all in all, it was a good Math Supply day between Yard Sales and Target.

However, don't forget that you don't actually have to buy all of your collections.  You can also ask your students to bring some in.  In fact, I love Deborah at Teaching Preschool's idea for providing Take Home Math Bags to her students to bring in 10 random items each week.  They count them, sort them, graph them, and even make collages with them.  LOVE this idea.

Happy Collection gathering!

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