About this activity
Eight analogies pitched at the level secondary and entrance assessments actually use: pediatrician is to children as veterinarian is to animals; drought is to water as famine is to food; reckless is to caution as apathetic is to concern; a chapter is to a book as a scene is to a play. These are not vocabulary questions — they are relationship questions wearing vocabulary, and students fail them by matching topic instead of relation.
How to use it in a session
Name the relationship out loud before choosing an answer. Say the first pair as a sentence — a pediatrician is a doctor for children — and then apply the same sentence to the second pair. That single step converts most of these from guesswork into reasoning. The reckless-to-caution item is the hardest in the set because the relationship is absence rather than category, and it is worth doing slowly and last.
What to listen for
Watch for topic matching. A student who answers drought is to water as famine is to drought is choosing the word that feels related rather than the one that fills the same slot, which is the single most common error at this level. Notice whether the student can state the relationship without the answer options in front of them — if not, the options are doing the thinking.
Carrying it home
Analogies work well as a car game, and they do not need to be formal. Ask what a garage is to a car, and let the student make one up for you. Making them is harder than answering them and builds the same reasoning.
Questions
- What ages are these for?
- Sixth through twelfth grade. The vocabulary reaches college-entrance level in places, which is intentional for older students preparing for those tests.
- Is it free?
- Yes, no account needed to play.
- Why do analogies show up in speech therapy?
- Because they are word-relationship reasoning, which sits under semantic organization. A student with a weak semantic network can know both words and still not see the relation between them.