Sorting is an important foundational skill that sets up the building blocks for logical thinking and organizing. These skills are necessary for later educational development in math (i.e. order of operations, geometry), reading (identifying main idea and relevant details), and writing (developing a topic sentence and organzing relevant details).
Most parents have simple puzzles like this at home. When my daughter was two, I held the pieces and gave her two choices. She would have to make a sound or word approximation (because of the severe apraxia) to request and then I would give her a piece and she would find the appropriate place.
Now that she is 4, I laid out the pieces as you see below, and she sorted them using a sentence: “A cat is a pet.” “A tiger is a zoo animal.”
To promote pre-literacy skills (exposure to print, print awareness), I wrote the name of the category on a sticky note and put it above the puzzle.
