I gave J a little bowl of Lucky Charms cereal and first had him sort the marshmallows using the sorting printout here. I actually had a bowl of cereal to sort myself. I've found this often helps J stay focused and work more independently. Sometimes if he's doing an activity with me just sitting there next to him, he'll ask for my help more often. If I have my own activity to work on, he's fine doing this by himself. It's also a great way to teach something new since I'm basically modeling what to do (and helped a lot when we did the charting later).
After sorting the marshmallows, he graphed them using the chart here. We practiced reading the graph to find out how many marshmallows he had in each category (without actually counting), and quickly determine which category had the most and the least.J did really well on this. He waited so patiently to eat his marshmallows (I did let him eat the broken ones and the cereal as we sorted).
Here's another chart that would work well for coloring, but there's not enough space for actually charting the marshmallows.
Age attempted: 35 months
