Children will use these bears in more ways than you can imagine. Some will play with them, as if they were miniature dolls. Others will sort them, count them, create patterns with them and organize them into families with larger bears representing the grown-ups and the smaller bears representing the children.

The bears are also proportionally weighted so they are a perfect item to be weighed on a scale. We will be looking at the Bucket Balance next week.

A fun game that I used to play with the bears was “The Trading Game”.  You begin by portioning out several bears to the children and yourself.  You then ask the children whether they want to “trade” their bears.  You can apply values to the bears (the large bears are worth 2 small bears, etc) and you ask the children to trade.  It is fun to see how the children approach the game.  Some think having “more” bears is the goal.  Others think that having bigger bears is the goal.  This can create a great discussion about value and equality.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Sorting items using one attribute as the key to groupings can be quite challenging for young children, but it can also be fun and exhilarating as well.

Take the counters above.  You could ask children to sort the animals by color (an attribute), by size (an attribute), by number of legs (an attribute) or by land or water (also attributes).  Remember, try to avoid asking children to think about more than one attribute at a time (color and size, for instance).

A good set will include lots of animals, sizes, colors, and other qualities.  You may even be able to differentiate between the “grown-up” animals and the “baby” animals.  That would be a great attribute to sort by.

You could also use the Sorting Circles to organize the animals by attributes.  Let us know how you use this manipulative in your program.