Sorting Rainbow Pasta

As a continuation of yesterday's post, I wanted to add a couple pics of Little Man trying a sorting game with his homemade rainbow colored pasta.  You can read about how to make it here. 

Recently, he has been into sorting all sorts of things by colors.  He especially loves sorting his letter magnets and his trains.  Today we attempted sorting six colors at once.  We spread the rainbow pasta out and designated a bowl for each color (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple).  The goal was to pick up one, and ONLY one piece of pasta at a time and place it in the corresponding bowl. 

After some modeling on my part (I'm learning about and practicing application of the Montessori method) and some practice time on his own, he really started to enjoy it.  It was difficult at first, but also fascinating for me to sit back and simply observe him without intervening.

When he was successful with matching the right color pasta with the correct bowl, he was very proud of himself, clapping and squealing "I did it!"  And on the flip side, when he added a different color piece to one of the bowls, he would stop, concentrate on it and eventually pull it out and try again for the right bowl. I'm telling you, I could actually see the wheels turning as he tried to figure out where things had gone awry and how he could fix it!  I was a very proud mama!