Step 7: Object properties
Your child responds !
All the pointing, describing, and asking you have been doing with your child has established that things have properties that can be discussed and reasoned with. You have been building up a vocabulary of words and concepts for describing things. It is time to start making more use of them.
Ask for things with a specific property
Practice using properties by asking your child to bring you something with that property. You could ask “Please bring me something that is red.” for example. As your child gets better at this, make the requests more complicated by combining more than one property – “Find a round wooden thing.”
Grouping things with a property
Practice grouping things with the same property. If your child has a collection of objects, ask to have all the round things put to one side.
A circle for each property
Make this more visible by drawing a big circle and having all the things that have a particular property put in that circle. For example, you could have all the things with a hole in them put in the circle. As this becomes easy for your child, use two circles that overlap – one circle could be for triangles, the other for things with holes, and the common area to the two circles would be for triangles with holes.
Which one doesn’t belong ?
A fun activity for practicing with properties is to show your child a small set of objects and ask which of them doesn’t belong. Challenge your child to identify the object that is not like the others and to explain why. Accept any reason that makes sense; your child may have an unusual reason.
For example, you could have pictures of some animals. Perhaps only one of them can fly. Maybe only one of them has two legs. This activity can provide fun challenges that let your child do some creative thinking with new concepts.