What is ordering and seriation in child development and how do you teach preschoolers to size objects in order?
These seriation activities for preschoolers are simple and hands-on. They are suitable for teaching your kids at home or at school.
What is Seriation in Early Childhood?
Seriation is one of the mental skills children learn in early childhood. It is developed alongside other cognitive abilities such as matching, sorting and learning about cause-and-effect relationships.
Seriation is a form of ordering – or arranging things – according to a graduated order, more commonly referring to arranging in terms of size.
Unlike temporal ordering (sequencing) which arranges things in the order in which they happen in time, seriation orders them according to graduations in size.
It is also possible to seriate items according to:
- colour (such as from lightest to darkest blue)
- taste (sweet to sour)
- sound (soft to loud)
- touch (smoothest to roughest)
These ordering activities basically answer the question “What comes next?”
In his work on child development, Piaget gave the term seriation. [source]
Examples of Seriation
Some examples of seriation that you will see in everyday life:
- Measuring cups that fit inside each other
- Nested cups or blocks for kids to play with
- Children standing in a line in height order
- A colour palette card in a paint shop with gradations of a shade of colour
What are Seriation Activities?
Seriation, or ordering activities, involve challenging children to place certain items in order, according to criteria, such as longest to shortest, thickest to thinnest, smallest to biggest, etc.
These activities can take the form of:
- Concrete activities (placing sticks from longest to shortest).
- Picture activities (place the pictures of the apples in order from smallest to biggest).
- Abstract activities (number the items on the worksheet from longest to shortest, or place these numbers in order from biggest to smallest).
How do you Teach Seriation?
At a preschool level, kids should be taught this concept mainly through hands-on activities, with physical objects.
A worksheet is meaningless to a child who needs time to grasp a concept. Start with playing and ordering objects, then move on to pictures of objects. Worksheets can be introduced later on.
It’s also not necessary to make every learning opportunity a “lesson.” Simply by adding measuring cups and spoons during water play, for example, kids will be learning the concept of seriation while playing, which is how most concepts are learned.
Remember to teach children new vocabulary by verbalizing what they are doing while playing. Use words like:
- Tallest
- Shortest
- Longest
- Thinnest
- Thickest
- Biggest
- Smallest
- Loudest
- Softest
- Roughest
- Lightest
- Darkest
To make the activities easier for younger children:
- Offer fewer items to arrange.
- Start the sequence and ask children “what comes next” or “what comes first” (before the others).
To make the activities more challenging:
- Offer more items to order.
- Offer all the items mixed together and ask the child to unjumble them in order.
- Make a sequence, and leave a few spaces randomly, for the child to fill in.
14 Ordering and Seriation Activities for Preschoolers
Use these simple activities to teach kids the concept of ordering and seriation. Substitute for different items wherever necessary.
1. Sticks and Straws
Collect sticks outside and arrange them from shortest to tallest or vice versa.
A variation is to use straws and cut them to different lengths.
2. Fruit and Veg
Offer a few of the same type of fruit or vegetable and place them in order of smallest to biggest. Use the same fruit so children can compare “apples with apples”, so to speak, instead of being confused by the varying shapes of different fruits.
3. Tidy Up
Teach kids to pack items away neatly, and in order. For example:
- In the outdoor kitchen, hang the cooking spoons from smallest to largest.
- Hang the clothes in order of length in the cupboard or on the rack when playing dress up.
- Pack the blocks on the shelf, starting with the largest on the left and the smallest ones on the right.
4. Nuts and Bolts
Offer nuts and bolts in all sizes, to be arranged in order.
This activity can also be used to teach one-to-one correspondence if you ask children to screw the right-sized nut onto the correct bolt.
5. Nested Cups
Play with nested cups and let children arrange them by stacking them in various ways:
- On top of each other from largest to smallest to form a tower
- Nested inside each other
- Next to each other in a line in order
6. Painting
Offer just one colour of paint in varying shades and let children experiment with the shades on paper.
7. Texture Play
In a bag that is not see-through, place sandpaper with different degrees of roughness inside and ask children to pull out the smoothest first, then the next and so on.
8. Everybody Line Up
Place the family members or children in class in a line, from shortest to tallest.
Then rearrange everyone from tallest to smallest.
9. Wooden Dolls
Play with those little wooden dolls that stack inside each other. You can also find wooden nesting eggs.
10. Shake and Listen
Using a few identical containers (tins or bottles), place varying amounts of beans inside each. Shake each bottle, listen to the sound and order them based on how many beans they think are in each container (the least to the most).
This activity can also be done with rice, lentils or something similar.
11. Leaves
Collect leaves in the garden and arrange them in order. Try to collect the same type of leaf.
12. Container Sort
Provide plastic bottles of all sizes and sort them according to height.
13. Base-10 Blocks
Play with small base-10 blocks (that come in multiples of one). Stack them next to each other in small piles to compare their heights.
They will improve their concept of numbers at the same time as they discover that 3 is 3 ones, 2 is 2 ones, etc.
14. Measuring Spoons
Play with measuring spoons and measuring cups during sand and water play. Make mud pies with the measuring cups and compare the sizes.
Source:
“Total Learning: Developmental Curriculum for the Young Child”, by Joanne Hendrick.