Functional Vocabulary Matching Binder: Pets

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 19 pages, 113 type-in fields

• A Pets Request board: three request/identify slots (I want, I see, Show me) and an eight-picture match — with its own 8 cut-apart cards on the same sheet
• A Furry or Not sort board: two sort slots and two picture-match grids (furry pets; pets without fur) — with its own 8 cut-apart cards on the same sheet
• Both boards twice: a full-color set for a laminated binder and a black-and-white ink-saver set for the photocopier
• 24 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 9 divider tabs (3 of them blank)
• A home version: the sort board's two groups at full size (8 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 pets-vocabulary binder built on one eight-word bank (dog, cat, fish, bird, rabbit, hamster, turtle, lizard) run through two different boards — naming and requesting any of the eight at the first board, then sorting the same eight by whether the pet has fur at the second, 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 a week of matching practice turns into a week of counts a case manager can bring to a meeting.

The Boards

• Pets Request (page 6 in color, page 7 in ink-saver) — the board stays whole above a cut line; the card band below cuts apart. Three request/identify slots (I want, I see, Show me), and an eight-picture match (dog, cat, fish, bird, rabbit, hamster, turtle, lizard): the child matches the identical card onto its picture.
• Furry or Not (page 9 in color, page 10 in ink-saver) — two sort slots (This pet has fur, This pet does not have fur), and two four-picture match grids: one for the furry set (dog, cat, rabbit, hamster), one for the not-furry set (fish, bird, turtle, lizard) — the same eight words, sorted by a real, checkable attribute of each picture.

The Words

• Pets request cards (8): dog, cat, fish, bird, rabbit, hamster, turtle, lizard
• Furry sort cards (4): dog, cat, rabbit, hamster
• Not-furry sort cards (4): fish, bird, turtle, lizard
• Home page — the sort board's two groups at full size: 4 furry cards, 4 not-furry 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 that test, that duplicated another card's likely name, or that read as a different animal family first was left out (candidates tried and dropped for this reason: a mouse-face picture that reads too close to the hamster-face card already on the board; a parrot picture that reads as "bird," already a card on this board; a duck picture, correctly drawn but a farm-or-pond animal first on this store's own Farm Animals binder; a snail picture, legible but not a typical classroom pet word — see the module docstring for the full list). No separate guinea pig picture exists in either set (the only rodent-pet picture is already "hamster"), but turtle and lizard both checked out clearly in both sets and were added, reaching eight words. The same eight-word bank is printed as cut-apart cards twice — once for the request board, once for the sort board — for 16 classroom cards plus 8 home-page cards, 24 in all; this is an honest eight-word bank run through two board types, not a padded board.

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. Nothing on either board assumes any student has, or wants, a pet at home — every prompt is a picture-naming or picture-sorting request, not a fact about the child. 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 naming 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 binder is part of the Morning Work & Adapted Books Collection; more matching binders 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.