Description

Naming and grouping an object within a category
“Find something that is a food.”
“Hamburger – which group does this belong in?”
“Is this in the furniture group?”
“Which group are you collecting?”
“What belongs in your group?”

Attending to two characteristics
“Find something that gives milk and eats grass.”
“Find something that is an animal and has a long neck.”
“Find the things that grow and we can eat.”

Research indicates that we store and retrieve words more easily if they have been organised into ‘collections’. Two important ways that we can organise words are by …
• Function – what we do with something (eat cake), what we use it for (cut with – scissors) or what it does (a bird flies).
• Semantic Class – A ‘word family’ includes groups such as food (cake, eggs, bread, cheese), wild animals (zebra, giraffe, lion, monkey), furniture (chair, bed, table, shelves).

This program targets the classification of objects into Semantic Classes whilst providing the child with multiple links which they can use to retrieve the words at a later time. Initially the child is presented with objects which are similar (all balls) but not identical (e.g. football, tennis ball, bowling ball, basketball). Once a child is able to group non-identical objects into groups, the Semantic Class cards and boards are presented (e.g. food, furniture, clothes, farm animals).