What really matters- Identifying A Feature or Taxonomy-  Whit is not only able to hold images or scenes of her world in mind, she is beginning to be able to identify one feature such as color or shape. Although she can only grasp one dimension of an object at once (eg size), this is an important step towards logical and mathematical skills, and the early thinking that is characteristic of children in preschool. Whit can scan across different objects to compare and contrast them on that one dimension.

How to put it into practice-

Tuning In- There are lots of ways you might notice your toddler exhibiting some of these categorization skills.  For example, Whit would put away all the block cubes before the block cylinders or she might eat all her dry cereal before eating any of the berries on her plate. We can attribute much of this new behavior to her budding categorization skills.

Bridging- Blocks are a great open-ended material that can be used for this type of sorting and comparing. You can sort them into piles of similiar type blocks. Put the cubes together; the flat ones together; the round cylanders together. Solicit your toddlers help as you create a pile. Saying “Let’s put all the cubes in this pile.” You can point to a cube or even put it in her hand to start the process but let her observe the shape of the blocks in the pile and see if she can identify the salient feature (cube) and then use that feature to select other similar blocks. Encourage her to sort the blocks herself.