Word Classes: Sort Twelve Words with No Pictures to Help

Nothing on this 2nd grade word-classes page can be sorted by looking. Twelve chips lie across the top in two rows and every one is plain text: dance, coconut, watermelon, round, run, throw, sweet, soft, persimmon, laugh, red, apple. Four of them name fruits, four say what somebody does, and four describe. The three bins below are the familiar ones, an icon on each lid and nouns, verbs and adjectives printed underneath, with five dashed lines inside each. Reading is now the only route in, so the child has to work out what persimmon is without a picture confirming it.

Taking the pictures away changes who the page is for. With them, a child can sort the illustrated chips before reading a single word; without them, every chip has to be read, understood and tested. That matters most for a word like persimmon, which many second graders will not have met, and which they can still place correctly by noticing that it behaves like coconut and apple in the list. Round, sweet and soft are all sensory adjectives that pair naturally with the fruit nouns, and a child who wants to write sweet in the noun bin because it makes them think of a snack is showing exactly the confusion between a thing and a quality that the sort exists to catch.

Print the PDF free and ask for a whispered sentence before each chip is written down: I can eat a persimmon, the persimmon is sweet. The nine word version puts a picture on every noun and is the place to start if reading is still effortful. The fifteen word version keeps the plain chips and adds a fifth word to every bin. Fix the sentence and write about the picture are where these words get used rather than classified.