Today I worked with a little girl who has a word-finding problem. She has difficulty naming words in categories and even understanding categories.
I brought out the “Mystery Garden” game by Ravensburger. The game board is a luscious painting of a path through a garden filled with flowers, animals, a lake, park, farm and so on. A player selects on of the 50 picture cards that are an exact picture of something on the board. The other player has to ask yes-no questions to guess what is on the card. This game of deductive reasoning, vocabulary, association and categories helps build language skills.
It took less time than I thought to teach my 5 year-old client to start with “bigger” questions that were more general dealing with categories. By playing the game, she finally learned what a category was, which was a concept that had been difficult for her to master. I drew big circles on a piece of paper and wrote “toys,” “animals,” “plants” and so on. She quickly understood the group of categories to form a question about in her first line of questions: “Is it a toy?” “Is it an animal?” If she started too specific, I would use the words, “Give me a bigger question.” We followed our questioning with where it was, “Is it in the sky?” “Is it on land?”
Then I needed to show her the next level of questioning based on the category. If I was holding an animal card the options were about attributes: “Does it have four legs?” “Is it furry?” “Is it smooth?” or “Is it big?” She quickly lost the temptation to ask if it was a specific object.
I was amazed at how easily this little girl started to see the hierarchy of questioning based on going from the more general to specific and being able to question according to attributes.
I knew the game was a hit when I found her making up her own cards for guessing when it was time for me to leave. She wanted to continue with Mom!
When working with a preschooler with word finding difficulties, I design my lessons around the vocabulary that she experiences most often in their everyday activities. Using the words to describe and tell stories, draw pictures and explain them, all give the child the opportunity to improve retrieval of basic vocabulary.
Yesterday, we read Sally Jean, the Bicycle Queen, by Cari Best. Sally Jeans life is chronicled by the bikes that she has ridden on from sitting on the seat behind her mom, to a tricycle, to training wheels to…oh, no. She has outgrown her bike and doesn’t have the funds to buy a new one. Getting the parts from her junkyard friend, she assembles her new bike. My little girl had just gotten a new bike and compared the parts that Sally Jean had to those on her bike (she didn’t have streamers but did have a basket!) She drew this lovely picture of her bike and names the parts, which can be hard for her. Note the basket with her stuffed bunny in it and the streamers coming out of the handlebars.) As we used the vocabulary of bikes, outside fun and family and friends, she re-told the story, and compared the bike to her own.
Using useful vocabulary within categories helps with word retrieval as she rehearses using the words in many contexts.
