Category Sorting Cut and Paste 3 Levels

About this resource

"Sorts objects by category" is one of the most common early-language goals on a K–1 IEP and on a

speech caseload, and it is the first vocabulary skill a child who cannot yet read a single word can do

correctly, today. This is the pack for that child. Five skills, one sorting job each, three levels of

every one.

The page is a street of little houses. The sign under each roof is a picture, not a word — a dog for

animals, an apple for food, a hat for clothes, a bus for vehicles, a pencil for school things — and the

cards are pictures too. Say the picture, name its group, glue it where it lives.

The pack takes it in steps: animal or food (two houses), then clothes or vehicle, then three houses at

once, then a page with no houses at all where the child glues an X on the picture that does not belong

with the other two, then a sorting day where the street grows from three houses to all five.

How The Three Levels Work

Level 1 — the fewest cards, a tinted box showing exactly where each piece goes, and no spare piece.

Every house still takes a card, because choosing the house is the skill.

Level 2 — one more card, no tint, and one spare piece. On the sorting pages the spare is a picture

whose group has no house on that page, so a student who uses every piece up has put one somewhere

wrong. On the does-not-belong page it is a fifth X for four rows: every card is the same, so there is

nothing to count.

Level 3 — six cards, no tint, nothing spare.

On every one of the 15 worksheets the cut strip is scrambled: a student who cuts the pieces left to

right and glues them house by house without deciding scores at most half the boxes on any sorting

page, and on the does-not-belong page the odd one is never in the same place three rows running.

The Five Skills

1. Animal or Food — two houses

2. Clothes or Vehicle — two houses

3. Animal, Food or Clothes — three houses

4. What Does Not Belong — three pictures in a row, the X glued on the stranger

5. Sort It All — three houses, then four, then five, with school things arriving on the last page

Every Picture Names Its Word

No picture on any student page has its word printed under it or beside it. Below the direction line at

the top of the page, the only print a student meets is pictures: the sign picture under each roof and

the picture on each card. The five sign pictures are never cards, so nothing on a sign ever has to be

sorted. So every picture in the pack is one that names itself and stays in its group whatever a child

calls it: kitty for the cat is still an animal, jacket for the coat is still clothes, sailboat for the

boat is still a vehicle. For every picture I wrote down the other names a five-year-old might give it

and checked that each one lives in the same house. A picture with a second name in a different group,

or that is two groups at once — a turkey is an animal in the yard and a food on the plate — was dropped

from the pack rather than shipped with a hopeful answer key.

Every page is full color that still reads as a clean photocopy, and every picture was looked at in

color and in grayscale at the size it prints before it was allowed on a page.

What Is In The File

• 26 pages, one PDF
• 5 scripted lesson plan pages — a script in quotation marks a substitute could read cold, three level

notes, three "if a student is stuck" tips with the likely cause named, a try-it-today idea and a data

box on every plan

• 15 student worksheets (5 skills x 3 levels)
• 2 pages of answer keys, recomputed from the same data that draws the worksheets
• 1-page "how to use this packet" guide that says exactly what is printed on a student page
• A name and date line, a big direction line and a cut rule on every worksheet
• No level word and no teacher note anywhere on a student page: the three dots on the name line are the

level code, and they are there for you, not for the child

Who This Is For

Speech-language therapy rooms, self-contained and resource classrooms, early-intervention groups, and

any PreK–2 room with students working on a categories goal — sorting, naming a group, telling what does

not belong. Nothing on a student page needs to be read, so it works for a child who cannot yet read a

word.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

A print-and-cut worksheet packet with a scripted plan page in front of each skill. It is not a fillable

form, not a full curriculum, and not a claim about how quickly any student will learn to sort — every

objective is written the way a classroom goal is written, with no clinical or legal claim attached

to it.