April Shower Categories

Spring in New Jersey, and possibly in the entire country, is starting to be a little haphazard. But now we're going into April, and the "April showers" are a great way to connect weather, seasons and idioms to your speech therapy!

Clouds and raindrops seem to be a great way to organize categories. In my experience, when children work on categories, particularly the basic ones, they also can't read. Or are at a low reading level whether because of low cognition or young age. That's why I made this almost entirely visual:

Here are the cloud categories with pictures and words for readers and non-readers alike.

The raindrops have pictures only. There are 7-8 raindrops for each cloud.

Here's how you use it:
Print and cut out the clouds and raindrops. I am always a fan of cutting along the picture, but I created square/rectangular lines to cut out because, let's face it, "ain't nobody got time for that!"
I also laminated color paper to use as a background. Velco, tape or use your fastener of choice to attach the cloud to the page and the raindrops underneath. Remove the raindrops for divergent categories, or leave the drops and find a matching clouds for convergent categories. You can get the best of both worlds by leaving 3 or so raindrops, find a matching cloud and additional raindrops in the appropriate category.

There are 20 total category clouds and blanks for you to create your own.

And a carryover homework page :) Use words or encourage art. For my little guys, I would ask them to draw a picture and ask the parent or homework helper to write the words underneath.

If your goal is category matching only, then this non-verbal activity is enough. To encourage more expressive language, ask non-readers to identify names of groups. You can provide choices of or withhold the clouds until students correctly identifies the category name. Additionally, ask students to name the items in the raindrops, explain why all the items are in the same category (a higher level activity). For example, all wild animals are in that group because they cannot be tamed or domesticated.
Even more: use the carryover raindrop activity as a description template, perhaps for the items in the categorizing activity.

You can find the FREEBIE here and the full packet here. Enjoy and happy Spring!

Diana