Sorting Activities for Preschool

Do you ever need educational activities for 2 and 3-year-olds? These fun sorting activities for preschool are fantastic for that age group and even into pre-kindergarten. They are a combination of color sorting, shape sorting, and fine motor practice.

We’ve had a number of requests recently for educational activities for toddlers and early preschool, so I’m sharing a few of my 3-year-olds favorites. She is old enough not to put things in her mouth, and can happily and independently work on all of these sorting games.

Sorting Activities for Preschool

Sorting Bears

These cute little counting bears are on of my toddler’s new favorite things. They are cute, easy to hold, and made in lots of fun colors. We start by just sorting the bears into their color coordinating cups. You can use fingers or tongs to pick up and move the bears. As she gets a bit older, we can also use these bears to work on counting skills, graphing, and many other early math concepts.

You can find these Cute Bears here.

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Sorting Cereal

This activity is always a huge hit, and you can start it quite early, as most children can put cereal in their mouths without choking. We start at around 2-years-old with plain Cheerios. The holes in Cheerios are larger and easier to thread a pipe cleaner through. This works as a simple, but excellent fine motor activity.

As they get older you can move onto colored cereal with smaller holes. This takes the fine motor skills to the next level as well as letting them start to sort by color or make patterns.

Find Colored Pipe Cleaners Here.

Rainbow Fish Sorting

The bright, happy colors of these rainbow fish make them one of my preschooler’s new favorite things. She loves grabbing them by the handfuls and just letting them fall through her fingers. They make an excellent ocean themed sensory bin!!

They are also perfect for color sorting. I used colored paper cups from my local dollar store, and had her sort them into the matching cups. You could change the difficulty of this activity by using different tools to pick up the fish like clothes pins, tongs, chopsticks, a spoon, or your fingers.

Find these Adorable Colored Fish here.

Cup Hair Color Sorting

This activity is a long time favorite with my toddler, and we use it in a variety of ways. She loves the challenge of threading her pipe cleaner pieces into the tiny holes in the top of a cup. For this activity we sorted by color, but you can also use it for counting, addition and more.

To make it even more fun, draw a face on the front of the cup, and turn them into color monsters with the pipe cleaners as monster hair.

Find Colored Cups here.

Pom Pom Color Sorting

We used a package of colored pom poms for this activity. I dumped them in a tray and gave her coordinating colored cupcake liners to sort her pom poms into. Fingers work great for this activity, but you can make it more difficult by having them use tongs or a plastic spoon to pick up each pom pom.

Find the Tongs here.

Shape Buttons Sorting

These happy colored shape buttons are one of my new favorite things. You can use them to sort by color or by shape, and the kids absolutely adore them. For this activity, I drew a rough shape of each button at the top, and had her sort them into graph like lines by shape.

This activity was challenging for my recently turned 3-year-old, but she did quite well. I was impressed that she was able to keep the lines separated and relatively straight. It also challenged her to look beyond the obvious color similarities and sort by shape. She managed to do it all by herself, and it is one of our favorite sorting activities for preschool.

Find the Colored Shape Buttons here.

Thank you for checking out our fun sorting activities for preschool. I hope you find some of these ideas helpful. Please remember to supervise young children as small sorting objects can be a choking hazard, and have a lot of fun learning today!