About this activity
Eight prompts that ask for a drawing and then a description: draw something round, red and sweet, then tell me three things about it; draw an animal with fur and tell me its size, colour and what it eats; draw a tool and tell me its name, what it does and who uses it. Drawing first means the child describes something they chose, which produces far more language than describing a picture handed to them.
How to use it in a session
Let the drawing be quick and bad. The picture is a scaffold for the talking, not the product, and a child who spends eight minutes colouring has spent eight minutes not talking. Ask for the three attributes explicitly after each drawing — name, function, and one physical property is the frame — and count them out loud so the child knows what a complete answer is. Twelve minutes covers two or three prompts properly.
What to listen for
Listen for which attribute types are missing. Most children give colour and size readily, function sometimes, and category almost never — an apple is a fruit is the attribute that goes missing and the one that matters most for word retrieval. Watch the compare prompt, where heavy and light have to be used relative to each other rather than absolutely.
Carrying it home
Describing games work in a car with no materials: I'm thinking of something round, red and sweet. The child guessing is doing the same work as the child describing, and both are useful.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- First through third, and it works for older students with word-finding difficulties.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all eight prompts play with no account.
- How does describing help word finding?
- Because it builds the routes into a word. A student who knows an apple's category, function, colour and shape has several ways to reach the word, where a student who only has a picture memory has one.