Sasha from TheAutismHelper.com shows Advanced Sorting File Folders, laminated Velcro activities for kids who've mastered basic matching. The folders include 10 two-category sorts like Real vs. Make-Believe and Hot vs. Cold, plus one four-category sort. They build discrimination, non-identical matching, and higher-order thinking without requiring writing skills.
Hi, this is Sasha from TheAutismHelper.com, and this is a product preview of Advanced Sorting File Folders. I love working on sorting because this is a great skill to work on with your kids that have already mastered complex matching. Kind of once we get to a point with some students that they can match, you don't really quite know where to go next, and sorting is a great area to go next because it teaches so many important skills. It teaches making associations, it teaches discrimination, it teaches non-identical matching, teaches yourself how to categorize things in different ways. So it kind of gets yourself— your mind organized to attend to stimuli in a different way as opposed to just matching. So I really, really love working on sorting. And these file folders are a little bit trickier. They're not your standard sorting by color or things like that. So it's really going to challenge your kids, which I think is really, really great, and we need to be challenging our kids more. Um, so with all my file folder sets, they come with 3 different labels. I like to make sure I stay really organized. I want to be able to find these quickly. So each sort will come with a title that goes on the front page, a title that goes on the tab, and a title that goes on the baggie. Um, the baggie title is really essential because my baggies get lost a lot, and then I don't have to waste time figuring out which it goes to. I already know which pieces it's for. Um, so to get started, the first one is Real vs. Make Believe. So here are all the pieces, and then the boards for Real Make Believe. If you're not familiar with file folder activities, These 2 pages would be glued inside of the file folder. The whole file folder would be laminated. You'll go ahead and place hard Velcro in each of these boxes. This page will be laminated as well and put soft Velcro on the back of all the pieces. And then these will be cut out. So student will have a bunch of pieces that they'll have to put on either the real or the make-believe page. Um, the next file folder is buildings vs. vehicles. So here's the buildings and vehicle pictures. Putting all the buildings together and all the vehicles together. Next is healthy versus unhealthy. Healthy foods versus unhealthy foods. We're really targeting some higher-level thinking skills here. Hot versus cold. Here's hot items and cold items. Little versus big. Again, they're all the same page— they're all the same size on this page, but students will have to think about the actual size of a strawberry compared to the actual size of a mountain. They're not going to have the visual cue of physically smaller item to help them this time. Next is breakfast first, dinner, so looking at foods that are for dinner versus foods that are for breakfast. Electronics versus school supplies, so what things have plugs, what things do we need power for versus what things do we use in school. Winter versus spring, so different winter items versus different spring items. And then the pages for this. Summer versus fall, the summer and the fall pictures. Animals that can swim versus animals that can fly. So again, this really is a trickier concept here. We're really having to identify the differences between these sets of animals. Sorting into 4 categories, so this is kind of making it a little trickier. The categories are food, animal, clothing, and plants. So they're gonna have to select which items go into which one, so making it even a little trickier on there. These file folders are really some of my favorites because they really do challenge my kids that sometimes I struggle with where to go next for them because maybe these are students that don't have writing skills yet or are more working on foundational level activities. So this is a great way to challenge them and really assess what they know. Again, this was a product preview of Advanced Sorting File Folder Activities by theautismhelper.com.
