Explain the basis of the sorting, and illustrate sorting the cards.
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Guided Practice: Under teacher guidance students can sort the pictures cards. It will make the students familiarize with the criteria used to sort and the mechanism of applying such criteria.
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Independent Practice: Put the pictures sorts into an investigation area. The students may then sort on their own, an activity practising the skills that they had learned during the guided session.
Example of Picture Sort
Suppose you are covering phonemic awareness with your students, in the part initial sounds.
You make a set of picture cards containing such pictures as a cat, cup, fish, and fire. You also provide photo image cards or sorting mats of the sounds /c/ and/f/.
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In the middle of your small group teaching, you state that the activity of the day is related to searching pictures through their initial sounding. You display the picture cards and the sorting mats that have Cc and Ff on it.
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Guided Practice You take the picture of the cat and ask the students what the picture starts with. Hopefully they answer /c/ . Then it gives you the cat picture card and you place it on the sorting mat under the /c/ sound. Repeat with the others picture cards directing the students to put fish and the fire on the /f/ mat and the remaining cup on the /c/ mat.
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Independent Practice: Once you have practiced, you can move picture cards and sorting mats to an investigation place. Here students are able to practice sorting the cards by themselves and practicing initial sounds.
The Versatility and benefits of a picture sort
Picture sorts are entertaining as well as being educational. They can be modified to work on a wide area of learning goals, including phonemic understanding and phonics knowledge, categorizing a range of science topics and vocabulary development. This means that picture sorts is a valuable resource to have within any early years classroom.
When picture sorts are incorporated in both the directed portions of their learning and their choice activities, your students will be able to flexibly transfer and extend their sorting skills to other tasks.
What are the advantages of picture sorts?
Picture sorts are an extremely engaging method of teaching students. The practical way attracts them and helps learning to be interactive and fun.
Eclecticism of Picture Sorts Between Subjects
The ability to use picture sorts in many and varied ways is one of their strongest points. They are convertible to suit almost any topic and educational goal.
Take only a few examples:
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Picture sorts: Picture sorts teach students to recognize and group pictures according to initial, medial or final sounds. And this activity can build on phonemic awareness, which is an essential Science of Reading practice during early reading learning.
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Developing Vocabulary: The sorting of picture cards would help them to increase vocabulary and practice speaking. This can be of help especially in language intensive subjects, such as literacy and social studies.
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Math Skills: A sorting is a basic math skill. Picture sorts help a teacher to teach students how to sort out and classify objects on grounds like shape and size, colour, etc. This kind of activity is also useful in building an ability to count and number sense.
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Science lesson: Science concepts can be taught (and reinforced) such as animal classifications, plant life cycles, and weather patterns by using a picture sort. The students are able to comprehend and learn more about the significant ideas by classifying images that relay to science issues
Learning of Specific Skills
Picture sorts help to encourage many of the most important skills acquisition among young learners:
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Phonemic Awareness: Sorting pictures according to the sounds they include will make students more aware of phonemic structure of the word, which is essential to both reading and spelling.
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Word and Concept Development: It allows students to enhance their language and vocabulary’s by encouraging them to sort and compare picture cards and concepts.
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Sorting and Categorizing: These activities aid students in becoming proficient at sorting and categorizing, a basic mental skill which is applicable in most fields of study.
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Counting and Number Sense: Number games that involve counting the number of objects or sorting or categorizing objects by number also help with developing a student number sense or counting skills.
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Memory and Recall: Memory and Recall can also be enhanced by picture sorts as a student is forced to recall and apply sorting criteria.
Developing the Accumulation of Life Skills
In addition to academic value, picture sorts teach real-life functions. Critical thinking skills apply in real-life situations that involve the ability to sort information as well as categorise it. Also, picture sorts provide the students with independence and self-regulation because the children start to work independently during the investigation time.
In my classroom, picture sorts is currently a great avalasible tool when it comes to involving the student and encouraging individual practice. The introduction of such cross-purpose activities both during a planned lesson and in investigation zones has allowed me to observe my students easily transfer and employ their sorting skills to new situations. This not only strengthens their learning but it also makes them feel independent and able to discriminate.
6 Picture Sort Uses in the classroom
Picture sorts are highly flexible and can be applied in any subject area in order to developing learning. Picture sorts are easily incorporated into lessons plans regardless of what subject you teach, whether that be English language arts, general science or social studies, picture sorts work into any lesson plan easily.
Instilling the Phonemic Awareness Skills through Picture Sorts
Picture sorts are a terrific means through which phonemic awareness can be taught. Sorting pictures by sounds can be done on those using only beginning sounds, initial sounds, short vowels, or long vowels. Picture sorts have proven to me that most phonemic awareness skills can be taught using picture sorts
They assist children in acquisition of the hearing, recognition and treatment of separate sounds in words, which is necessary in reading readiness. Using pictures also means that you are dealing with sounds and not written letters of the alphabet. Pronunic awareness is an oral exercise Phonics entails the written display of sounds.
Activities like sound sort activity with picture sound cards are very common in my classroom. Another example would be initial sounds, such as the picture cards with images such as a mosquito, mushroom, nose and noodles.
One of the tasks used during small group instruction would be the sorting mats and explain that we will sort the pictures by their beginning sounds. As we sort, I ask the students to put the pictures of the mosquito and mushroom on the mat marked /m/ and pictures of the noodles and nose on the mat marked /n/.