Category cards are a type of tool that speech therapists use to help clients with stroke and brain injury improve their communication and cognition skills. They work by challenging the client to name as many things in a certain category as they can within a set time frame.
This deck of category cards can be used in many ways to teach students the skill of identifying categories and categorization. I use this deck with my students who are working on understanding superordinates, subordinating, and taxonomy. It could also be used by speech-language pathologists, teachers, or parents.
For the speech therapist, it’s important to provide your patients with clear and concise instructions. These cards are designed to print and cut out so that you can quickly teach your patients how to articulate certain consonants or sounds.
Category cards are one of the most versatile tools for language development. They can be used for both receptive and expressive language therapy, and in a variety of different ways.
For example, a therapist might use category cards to target receptive language skills by asking a child to find all of the items on the card that belong to a given category. The child might then point to each item or say its name. Alternatively, the therapist might ask questions about the items on the card, such as “what is this?” or “what do you do with this?”
Category cards can also be used to target expressive language skills. For example, a therapist might ask the child to find an item that belongs in a particular category (e.g., “find something you wear”) or make up sentences about each item (e.g., “I put the hat on my head”). The child could also use the cards in play and pretend scenarios by pretending to use each item in some way or having their doll or stuffed animal use them (e.g., “Mommy put her shoe on her foot”).
Category cards are designed to test a person’s ability to recall and identify objects that belong in a certain category. They can also be used to assess and improve communication skills, speech articulation, and language development.
Each card has a picture of an item in the category on one side and the name of the item written underneath the picture on the other. The categories include: colors, shapes, animals, transportation, clothing, food, common household objects, and more!
These flashcards can be used by parents with their children as young as two years old (or even younger if they are interested in learning about colors). We recommend starting off simple by asking your child what color something is or asking them for help finding something that matches one of these cards (if it’s not too difficult). If they need more practice with answering questions then try using our app “Speech Therapy” which offers several different categories including colors.
In speech therapy, a category card deck is a set of cards with words that fall into the same general category. For example, all the cards in one deck might be kinds of fruits or vegetables.
A patient or client holds up the different cards and tells examples that are in each category. So if they’re holding up a card that says “fruits,” they might say “apple, banana, orange.” Or if they’re holding up a card that says “vegetables,” they might say “carrot, lettuce, onion.”