Functional Vocabulary Matching Binder: Food

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 19 pages, 120 type-in fields

• A meals-and-snacks board: three request slots (I want, I am eating, All done, I had) and a 12-picture match — with its own 12 cut-apart cards on the same sheet
• A fruits-and-vegetables board: two category slots (This is a fruit / This is a vegetable), a 9-picture fruit grid and a 5-picture vegetable grid — with 9 fruit cards and 5 vegetable cards
• Both boards twice: a full-color set for a laminated binder and a black-and-white ink-saver set for the photocopier
• 41 cut-apart picture cards in all, counting the color set and the home page once
• A weekly tracker: 8 board jobs down, Monday to Friday across, one letter per cell (no help / pointed once / said the words / not run), a "no help" count per row and a week total
• A binder organizer: a front cover, a spine strip and nine divider tabs (three of them blank)
• A home version: a smaller set of the same request-and-sort cards (15 cards) for the kitchen table, with a seven-day "we did it" row
• A family update with a team hand-off block for the next adult who runs the binder
• A phrase bank: 24 lines in 6 groups (spoken lines for running the boards, written starters for the note afterward)
• A filled example — an invented student, one week, every count re-counted from its own row
• An answer key listing every board, the cards it takes and what correct looks like, plus the full word list (classroom set and home set)
• Start Here, a contents page with page thumbnails, and a "what's next" back page

A food-vocabulary binder built for two skills at once: requesting (I want, I am eating) and sorting (fruit or vegetable), each with its own tracker row. Most matching binders stop at the board; this one adds the tracker, the family update and the phrase bank behind it, so requesting and sorting food turns into a week of counts a case manager can bring to a meeting.

The Boards

• Meals and snacks (page 6 in color, page 7 in ink-saver) — the board stays whole above a cut line; the card band below cuts apart. Three slots for functional requesting phrases, and a 12-picture match (pizza, sandwich, hot dog, hamburger, pancakes, waffle, cookie, popcorn, cheese, bread, pretzel, cupcake): the child matches the identical card onto its picture.
• Fruits and vegetables (page 9 in color, page 10 in ink-saver) — two slots sort each card onto "This is a fruit" or "This is a vegetable," then two picture grids (9 fruits, 5 vegetables) check the match.

The Words

• Meals and snacks cards (12): pizza, sandwich, hot dog, hamburger, pancakes, waffle, cookie, popcorn, cheese, bread, pretzel, cupcake
• Fruit cards (9): banana, apple, strawberry, grapes, watermelon, pineapple, pear, lemon, cherries
• Vegetable cards (5): carrot, broccoli, tomato, onion, bell pepper
• Home page — a smaller subset: 6 meal cards, 4 fruit cards, all 5 vegetable cards

Every picture was chosen to be named in one word by a young child, in color AND in the black-and-white set; a word that failed in either set was left out of both. The vegetable list is honestly shorter than the fruit list (5 words against 9): every vegetable picture that reads clearly in both the color and the ink-saver set is already on it.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

It is a fillable PDF: type into the tracker, the organizer, the home page and the family update, or print and use a pen. The board pages print on cardstock or plain paper; the card band cuts off the bottom and the board stays whole. It works offline with no account or subscription. It is NOT an editable online slideshow or word-processor document, and it is not a test of anything.

It carries no prompt hierarchy, fading schedule or mastery rule, and it does not decide what a count means for a student or when a board is done with. The tracker counts which boards were done and what help was given, and nothing else.

Who This Is For

Special education teachers and paraprofessionals running functional-vocabulary or requesting practice with early, pre-reading or low-verbal students, case managers who need that practice to show up as data, and the families who get the home page.

More In The Collection

This is the second binder in the Morning Work & Adapted Books Collection; more matching binders (clothing, community signs, classroom objects) are being added to the collection regularly, all on the same boards-plus-tracker shape.

Pictures (color pages): Noto Emoji by Google, Apache License 2.0. Pictures (ink-saver pages): Fluent Emoji, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, MIT License.