Basic Matching Activities
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Angela Nelson received her BA and JD from UCLA where she studied and practiced behavior psychology under Dr. Ivar Lovaas. As Founder and CEO of Stages Learning Materials, Angela has created autism and special needs curriculum products since 1997.
Basic matching is one of the first lessons taught in an ABA program with kids with Autism. Generally a therapist will start with “nesting items” such as bowls or cups. You put one bowl on the table and hand the other bowl to the child. Then you teach the child to “match” the two items.
Gradually you work toward matching pictures of items rather than the real items. The picture of the cat goes with the picture of the cat (not the pineapple!). When you begin to teach matching with pictures, you start by matching identical pictures (2 exact duplicate cat pictures, for example). Then you move to similar card matching(matching the picture of the grey cat to the picture of the orange cat).
What does matching teach a child? How can this be a step toward developing Language? Matching skills have a few valuable places in cognitive development:
- This is a relatively basic activity, which allows you to establish a teaching environment with the child.
- Learning to match items is a precursor to language. You can’t learn the label “cup” if you don’t know that a cup is different than an apple.
- Links have even been found between sorting skills and the development of the understanding of cause and effect.
Stages Learning Materials offers a few different products to help teach early sorting and matching skills. The Language Builder Picture Cards have 105 cards in the set that we call The Basic Stage Set. In Stage One of the Basic Stage Set, 15 images have an exact duplicate to teach identical matching. For Stage Two, there are 5 similar cards to teach similar matching and generalization.
Stages also offers 10 memory card games which are great to teach matching skills.
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