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The sorting activity with the animal pictures is a very useful tool for my classroom. Young children eagerly organize photographs and objects into groups. I cannot predict how they would sort the pictures, but I am sure they would, with great confidence, sort the photos into "the ones that are the same."

Counting the number of different plants is a harder project, it mandates 1:1 number correspondence and the ability to count. Given thiese skills, the children would most likely just have fun running around picking every plant they could see saying, "Here's one. Here is another one." Once we got ALL the picked plants inside, a sorting activity could begin. My guess is that sorting the plants would be harder than the photographs.

Young children do naturally sort items; it takes time to sort items that are similar and different in multiple ways. That learning curve seems to be a slow one that much education and modelling cannot rush to maturity!