Card Sorting Activity for Toddlers

A quick and easy card sorting activity for toddlers

Playing cards are one of life’s perfect activity supplies. They’re colored, they have numbers, shapes, they represent quantities, they’re just.plain.fun. So this card sorting activity – well, let’s just say it wasn’t a hard sell.

RELATED: Looking for more activities and more of a routine with your toddler or preschooler. Check out “Playing Preschool”: my 190-day activities program.

The many layers of awesomeness in this activity…

I won’t mince words here: this activity has some massive learning to it and it’s just plain fantastic.

Let’s peal away the layers of this activity onion:

• It’s a sorting activity
• It’s exposing kids to numbers
• It’s showing the link between numeral and quantity

This activity kind of has it all.

What’s so great about sorting?

Sorting is life.

Don’t overlook sorting – it’s one of the most powerful thinking skills we can help kids develop in early childhood.

When a child is sorting, they are analyzing information, categorizing data, and organizing attributes.

This is a skill that will be used in reading, writing, math, and science when our kids hit school – it’s such a great skill to give them loads of experience and background knowledge in.

RELATED: Looking for more easy indoor toddler activities? I have tons!

Here’s the simple card sorting activity set up

Busy Toddler is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.  Read more about these links in my disclosure policy.

Materials:

• Playing cards
• Construction paper

Simple set up: I laid down a red piece of construction paper and a black one. I handed my toddler a deck of playing cards (you can choose to take out the face cards or leave them in – I take them out to avoid any confusion).

Let’s get sorting!

My son sat with the stack of cards sorting them by red and black.

This is not as easy as it looks – it actually has some trick to it.

It took a lot of visual discrimination for my three-year-old to track between red and black.

And the bonus of this card sorting activity:

As he’s sorting, he’s also seeing numbers – either saying what he’s seeing, asking me about them, or counting the shapes on the cards. He was so immersed in numbers / math as he worked through the stack of cards.

Not too bad for 47 seconds of prep.

RELATED: Need some math ideas for little kids? Check out these!

When will you set up this activity?

It’s such an easy activity to set up back it packs so much goodness in a very simple package.

When our kids are practicing their sorting, they really are doing a whole lot of learning. It’s a really easy way to help them grow.

Try this card sorting activity today!