Toward of the end of the year in preschool as my students get better at sorting, I usually begin introducing Venn Diagrams. I love Venn diagrams because it visually allows students to organize information and recognize relationships amongst 3 sets of items by breaking them apart which is a higher order thinking skill.
It is like we are “visually” thinking of the differences and the similarities at the same time! I started pretty simple for Ollie (4) by sorting out shapes just like I would for my students. He was supposed to notice the “blue circles” but then break that apart into blue items and circles.I just used foam sticker shapes and he got to peel off the back (fine motor practice) and sort them into the Venn Diagram. For a 4 year old, he did pretty well with this! You could use cut outs of paper, toys, just something that has two different characteristics that can be broken down.
