Play Doh Sweets

Isaac received the Play Doh Candy Cyclone from Grandma for Christmas and it's been a huge hit. He's able to crank the handle himself, and loves seeing the resulting balls of play doh swirl down the helter skelter. It's motivated him to finally attempt making balls and sausages of play doh himself, and he enjoys making the little sweeties by hand. Fab for developing his fine motor skills. After a bit of complaint that I wasn't Daddy (Daddy is much more fun to play with), we settled down to almost a couple of hours of play doh play.

After he'd made as many sweeties as we wanted, we worked on putting them into size order. This was actually a really tricky task, as the shapes of the sweeties were very variable, so it was hard to assess which had the larger volume in some cases. But we managed to agree on a sequence. 

The fancy word for this skill is seriation.

...relationships can exist within categories. This is illustrated by the ability to arrange similar objects according to some quantified dimension, such as weight or size. This ability is called seriation. A seven-year-old can arrange eight sticks of different lengths in order from shortest to longest, indicating that the child appreciates a relation among the different sizes of the objects....

"The sweeties looked yummy and good!" - Isaac, aged 3 years, 10 months