Stop guessing about category goals- use this resource in speech therapy to quickly and easily informally assess and progress monitor a student’s ability to identify categories and items in categories. This informal assessment and progress monitoring resource contains 23 pages and 200+ categories organized by level and category type- convergent and divergent. Convergent and divergent category activities are provided to target receptive and expressive language processing skills with four different levels of difficulty. Categories targeted include not only nouns, but also verbs, adjectives, and other concepts that students need to understand before they can later effectively identify similarities and differences and use describing skills.

• Organized, target-specific data sheets help you to capture student performance throughout the year and monitor progress through different category skills.
• Four levels of category tasks provided:
  • Early Learner Level-pictures for expressive and receptive categories
  • Lower Level- divergent categories and convergent categories
  • Upper Level- divergent categories and convergent categories
  • Advanced Level- divergent categories and convergent categories

• Quickly and easily determine a student’s level of ability to use categories
• Thoughtful categories and describing words selected for each task and level- everything is done for you!
• The ability to understand and use categories precedes other important language processing skills like understanding similarities, differences, and describing.
• This resource targets convergent categories (given a set of items, name the category) and divergent categories (given a category, name items in the category). Tasks are separated by convergent and divergent categories in lower, upper, and advanced levels.
• The early learner level includes pictures. Pictured items are a mixture of familiar objects young children see on a daily basis and vocabulary such as animal names that most young children have been exposed to.

• Broad categories and narrow categories are included at each level.

What's included in this Categories Language Processing Resource?

• 23 page resource, 200+ category targets
• 7 data sheets for each specific activity to collect data throughout the year
• 7 activities organized by level and task that can be used to collect data four times per year.
• This resource is organized into four sections:
• 1) early learner level- typically for preschool to kindergarten aged students who need picture support. You can use the pictured early learner category skill inventories for expressive and receptive identification of categories, depending on the needs of your student
  • The early learner level has 4 sets of 7 category targets (21 total)
  • use these for both expressive and receptive category assessment

• 2) lower level- typically pk-2nd grade
• 3) upper level- typically 3rd grade- 5th grade
• 4)advanced level- 6th grade +, or in some cases students who have advanced vocabularies compared to their level of language organization.
  • lower, upper, and advanced levels come with a convergent category skill inventory and a divergent category skill inventory
  • Each skill inventory at lower, upper, advanced levels has 4 sets of 10 sets of targets (40 targets total)