Word Classes: Sort Nine Words, with a Picture on Every Noun

Three of the nine word chips on this 2nd grade word-classes page carry a small picture, and all three are animals: dolphin, seagull, giraffe. The other six are plain words in the same rounded white chips, slow, swim, sit, run, purple and red, sitting in two loose rows across the top. Underneath stand three tall bins with an icon on each lid, a framed picture for nouns, a running figure for verbs and overlapping color blobs for adjectives, with the label printed below. The child reads a chip, decides which of the three it is, and writes it on a dashed line inside the right bin.

Nine chips is three for each bin, and knowing that is a legitimate strategy: a child who has placed three verbs can stop looking for a fourth. The pictures do the same work more quietly. A picture can only be pinned to a naming word, so the illustrated chips are effectively pre-sorted and the real thinking is left for the six plain ones, where the choice is between doing and describing. Colors are the easiest adjectives to recognize, which is why two of the three are here, and slow is the chip that shows whether the child is thinking about the job of a word or just its familiarity.

Print the PDF free and let the child say each word inside a short spoken sentence before writing it down, since the sentence usually settles the argument. This is the entry point of the three sorting pages. The twelve word version removes every picture and adds a fourth word to each bin; the fifteen word version stretches it further with five in each column and no support at all. The unscramble the sentence page puts words of all three kinds back into an order, which is the other half of the same idea.