It's always a nice surprise to find good educational stuff at a local toy store. I spent $3.95 the other day on some animal flashcards that I really like and that dovetail well with the Montessori curriculum. On one side they have a label like "Mammal," "Reptile" and "Bird," and on the other side there is a picture of a specific species with its name and some interesting facts. I've used other cards for classifying with small children before, but I like these better because it's easier to put the animals into groups when the labels are so clear.
It's a bonus when you find works that one of the older kids can do with a toddler! While 3rd grader "Peel" helped lay out the cards, her younger sister looked in our bins full of toy animals to see if she could match each animal to a card.
We had some toy animals that didn't fit a card or the categories we had, so we made our own labels. For instance, the hermit crab is a crustacean (which is easy to remember if you think of his shell as being crusty!)
I think I'll buy a large piece of felt for this work (like the kind used for the really big Math works) to cut down on the visual noise. You can do extensions by sorting animals in other ways. For instance, each card indicates the animal's habitat and the area of the world in which it lives.
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