Category Practice

Students appear to use a different kind of thinking when they create original patterns following rules they create (Grabowski, Damasio, & Damasio, 1998). Activities that engage students in building categories can start as early as preschool. Building category practice can be done with a bag of mixed buttons. After first modeling the procedure, you can have students work on their own or in pairs to sketch the categories they discover. Th is would also work as a language arts learning center activity. With a bag of buttons, students can decide multiple ways to categorize them. Students are likely to start with more obvious classifi cations such as size or color, but with prompting they will move to other patterns such as two or four holes, or smooth or indented. Ask verbally, or on cards at learning stations, leading questions such as, “How else can you group the buttons by other similarities?” or “What else do some of the buttons have in common?”

Word recognition can be compatible with the brain’s patterning systems when modeling and practicing activities emphasize the pattern. Strategies that practice patterning words and letters into categories could increase students’ ability to recognize and file new data into existing classifications quickly and accurately. Th e assumption is that if words are taught in relation to existing categories they will be more efficiently recognized in specific regions where the brain stores related data. Th at process would logically be faster and more efficient than a whole-brain random search when the new data is not recognized as belonging to any existing stored, related pattern.

Judy Willis, Teaching the Brain to Read: Strategies for Improving Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension (2008)

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