Categorisation is an important skill for several reasons.
Firstly, it supports us in our everyday lives by helping us organise items in a logical way such that we know where they are. Children know (or should know!) where to find a spoon to eat their cereal with, where their toothbrush is, where to find their coat, and where their toys should go after playing with them. From their earliest days, children use categories to structure their world and complete tasks in a more efficient way.
Secondly, it is a foundation skill for mathematics.
Thirdly, categorisation supports memory through a process called clustering. Our long-term memory ‘clusters’ information into related groupings, and this supports recall.
By way of illustration, study this list of 20 words for a few minutes and then try to recall them.
Onion, red, pink, cat, tulip, rose, daffodil, green, carrot, cabbage, horse, daisy, goat, potato, yellow, rose, cow, broccoli, dog, blue.
How did you do? It is quite a challenging task. Did you approach it with a strategy?
Sorting the words into categories makes memorising them much easier.
- Vegetables: Onion, carrot, cabbage, potato, broccoli.
- Colours: Red, pink, green, yellow, blue.
- Animals: Cat, horse, goat, cow, dog.
- Flowers: Tulip, rose, green, yellow, blue.
Thus, categorisation supports the organising, processing, learning, and recalling of new information. It further supports a child in developing their executive functioning skills.
Children’s ability to categorise builds on their sorting and matching skills. From the outset, children are forming ideas about how things are alike and how they are different. These skills develop alongside language. At first a child may point to and refer to all animals as ‘dog;’ as they develop a greater understanding of a dog’s features, they will be able to distinguish them from other animals.
As such, language and categorisation go together. Concrete concepts, such as dog, are more easily understood than abstract ones, such as love – animals being more readily identifiable and easier to define than qualities or feelings. Moreover, concrete concepts are less susceptible to change over time; life experience can change our abstract concepts. Children with language difficulties or those who tend to be quite literal thinkers will need further support with categorising.
How to Begin?
As mentioned, categorisation stems from naming ability. Young children learn to name toys and familiar objects through conversation and play. Their next step is to match and sort real objects before moving to more symbolic representations.
What might this look like?
With the category of clothing, children gradually learn the names for each item. They can build on this by helping with putting the laundry away by sorting it into piles e.g. gathering all their socks and then looking for matching pairs. Further enhance this early knowledge by having them sort according to criteria e.g. sports clothing, school uniforms, items for warm weather/cold weather etc.
Extension:
Move from sorting real items to symbolic ones. Depending on the child, this process may be sorting dolls’ clothing, sorting photographs of items of clothing, and finally sorting drawings of clothing.
In the next post, we will look specifically at how to use CardEd for categorisation.