Sorting games

Those moments where you open the door,
witness the mess, say "Yup"
and just close the door again... 

Smooch loves to sort things.  She loves to sort by colour, by shape, by size, and sometimes, by some other pattern that I can't always figure out.  As patterns and size comparisons are the beginnings of math, I encourage this exercise as often as possible.  She loves to put small things into different containers, so I'll often grab 3 or 4 plastic tubs from my Tupperware drawer and a bag of chip clips and she'll sit on the floor in the kitchen while I'm cooking dinner and sort, and resort, and then make a tremendous mess by dumping them all out on the floor, while laughing infectiously.  She also loves to distribute things in muffin pans.  She'll use her mini muffin pan from her kitchen, and will organize her rocks/ marbles, buttons, puff balls, or any other small objects she can find.  It is often incredibly spontaneous, like in the bathroom with her hair clips. She'll make what looks like a huge mess, but just as I'm getting frustrated for the mess, I notice the bath mat, and how she's started sorting them by colour. I usually just take a deep breath, and let it happen, and deal with cleaning it up later. However,we do have to be careful to keep the small stuff up off the floor, now that WeeMan is mobile & constantly putting everything in his mouth, but I give her free reign to sort as she pleases most of the time.  Recently, while WeeMan was napping, we sat on the floor together with her muffin pan and her rocks, and she put one in each cup.  Jumping on the chance to count with her, I put a second one in a few of the cups, and asked her which ones needed another rock.  She surveyed the pan, then pointed to a cup that had only 1 rock, and I placed a rock in that cup.  She seemed to catch on quickly.  Once each cup had 2 rocks, I added a third to one cup, then handed her a rock, and said, "Where does this one go?" She placed it in a cup that only had 2 rocks.  I repeated this, and she continued filling the cups one by one, until all 12 had 3 rocks.  I attempted to do four, but then she decided all the rest needed to go into one cup, and then they all needed to be dumped out.  Ah, well.  Such is the attention span of a 2 1/2 year old!  Maybe we'll try again tomorrow.  These activities are especially good on rainy days, when we cannot go outside.  It requires a different kind of energy, mental instead of physical, but it helps keep her from bouncing off the walls by dinnertime.