Preschool Computational Thinking

Grocery Store Trip!

Summary

In this activity, you and your child will think about how to sort items on your grocery list to more easily find items when you shop. Many of our everyday routines involve abstraction, including at the grocery store when we rely on signs to find items on our list. Signs only show the necessary information that helps us find items, but do not list every item in that section.

Activity Steps

Review the idea of abstraction.

Abstraction involves ignoring irrelevant details and focusing only on key information.

To get ready for a grocery store trip, think about how you may want to organize your grocery store list with your child. Grouping similar items together or things that belong in the same category can help make shopping quicker or easier.

Let’s think about what we need to buy. Sorting what we need into groups can make it easier to find what we need at the store. When we sort, we focus on specific details and ignore others. Can we make a list that groups our food into categories so we can more easily find them at the store?

Make your grocery list together and sort items into groups.

How can we group food that we will need to buy into groups? Maybe fruits? Vegetables? Snacks?

Invite your child to label each group (i.e., draw foods associated with each category) and explain how labels show only the important details to describe what is in each group.

We can label each group to easily find what we are looking for at the grocery store. How should we label this group? What about this group?

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Preschool Computational Thinking

Grocery Store Trip!

Summary

Activity Steps

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