Early reasoning skills

Speech and language therapy

﻿Hello, everybody, my name is Emma, and welcome to today's lesson. I'm looking forward to today's session. And I hope you are too. I can't wait to get started. But before we do, just a quick reminder, we here at Oak are here to support any approaches you might already be using and any work you might have already been set. We know this lesson is going out to so many different children and families. So if you're not sure, or have any questions, please do contact your child's school or usual speech and language therapy team. In today's session, we'll be focusing on early reasoning skills. I'm going to show you at home how you can set up a colour concepts sorting activity, and then I'm going to share some advice on some different activities that you could carry on with at home. So for today's session, you'll need some clothes pegs. If you have some at home some paints would be great, or some coloured paper. You'll also need some buttons if you have some spare, some scissors, and some containers or bowls. But before we begin, find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed for the lesson. Turn off any distractions or notifications that you might have running on your device and make sure that you and your adult are seated comfortably. When you're ready, let's begin. Okay, let's start by doing some talking and thinking about early reasoning skills. Children's information processing skills develops progressively over time. Early information processing or early thinking skills include being able to find and collect relevant information and then being able to sort that information out. Colour matching and sorting activities is a great place to start in supporting your child's early reasoning and early thinking skills. So pause the video here to get some wooden pegs and coloured paper. Okay, if you have some. When you've got together what you need, come back to the video and press play to continue. Now that you've got your pegs together, you can either paint your pegs or attach colour paper to them so that they can be sorted. We want our pegs to look like this. Here you can see I have painted my pegs in four different colours. I then painted some card to match the colours that I chose for my pegs. If I didn't have paint, I could just cut a small strip of coloured card and stick this to my pegs and then cut a piece of card to be matched to those pegs. So it looks similar to how I've laid the task out here. Here are some instructions to go over how to create your colour coded pegs. So pause the video to get your pegs ready in whichever way suits you best at home. Here you can see I've had to go completing my colour match task. I've taken my pegs from the left hand side and attach them to the pieces of card on the right. I've colour matched my pegs to the pieces of paper. So pause the video here to complete your colour match activity at home. When you've had a couple of goes, come back to the video and press play to continue. Colour matching sorting supports children to begin to gather visual information and then understand its meaning. The aim is for children to complete colour match tasks with as much as, with as much independence as possible over time. When working on your colour matching and sorting, the key is to consider how many colours or items are being presented at once. As I said, start simple and provide support and modelling to show your child how to complete the task first. Pause the video here to gather up some simple coloured buttons. A few of the same colours would be great and some pots. If you don't have any buttons lying around, you could cut out some circles from your coloured paper that you used earlier. When you've got everything ready, come back to the video and press play to continue. So here's how we would organise our buttons sort. As you can see in the bottom left, I've got all my buttons mixed together. I then take each button and sort it into a separate container for that colour. Here, I started with four options, but you might choose to start with just two. So pause the video here to complete a button sort game. I hope you have lots of fun sorting your buttons into the box. When you finish, come back to the video and press play to continue. Here are some more ideas with different colour sorting games that you could play at home. If you've got some LEGO or building blocks at home of different colours, these could be really effective in a sorting game. You could also practise sorting real clothes into colours, or just draw pictures of clothing and colour them in to be sorted. If you've got some pipe cleaners or string you could have a go threading beads of different colours. You can also create lots of different sorting pots at home, so that objects and pictures of coloured items can be sorted into them as and when throughout your day. So pause the video here to pick one of those tasks and have another go with some colour sorting at home. When you finish, come back to the video and we'll finish the lesson. The important thing is that you're having lots of fun with colour sorting at home. Try and work into as many of your daily activities as you can. Well, that brings us to the end of today's lesson. But a really big well done on all the fantastic colour sorting that you've done today. Don't forget to share some of the hard work that you've been doing with your school. And let them know about all the wonderful progress that you're making. If you'd like, you could also ask your parent or carer to share some of your work on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter by tagging at Oak National so I can see the wonderful progress that you're making too. Well, all that's left for me to say is thank you. But take care and enjoy the rest of your learning. Bye-bye.

Early reasoning skills

Early reasoning skills

These resources will be removed by the end of the Spring Term 2026.

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