Sasha from TheAutismHelper.com shows printable file-folder activities where students sort nonidentical items into categories like birds vs. cats or flowers vs. houses. The tasks move beyond matching to require active decisions about where each item belongs, helping students develop discrimination skills and slower, more deliberate work habits.
Hi, this is Sasha from theautismhelper.com, and this is a product preview of Non-Identical Sorting File Folder Activities. So non-identical sorting is basically breaking items into 2 categories, but the types of items don't match exactly. So this is a perfect next step for your kids that have mastered matching but aren't quite ready for some more complex categorizing. So I'll give you an example of the structure of these non-identical sorting activities. So each one comes with the labels for the file folder activities and directions for setup. If you're not familiar with file folders, they're a great way to store things in an efficient and easy-to-use way. So this one's sorting birds and cats. So again, all the birds are similar, but they're not identical birds. So your student's gonna have to use discrimination skills to identify the difference between the birds and the cats. So simple, but still a little bit more complex than that traditional just matching. So here are the 2 pages for sorting the birds and sorting the cats. The rest of these file folders follow a similar pattern. So flowers vs. houses, sorting bugs and snakes, soups and sandwiches, dinosaurs and trees, "Nuts and Hats," "Sorting Buildings and Cars," "Cookies and Phones," "Chairs and Airplanes," "Balls and Fish." Alright, and that's it. So I really wanted to include a lot of different examples so your students can have lots of repetition practicing this skill. They're not just used to sorting balls and fish, they can sort any two different items. You can even make these all into one page and throw them all in a binder and then pull out as many as you want. Pull out 5 pages and have your kids sort 5 different things. The most important thing is that they're really gonna have to attend during this task. They can't just absent-mindedly match, they're gonna really have to look and decide where each item better goes, with the balls or with the fish. So it's gonna be great for those kids that are really speedy workers to slow them down and get them focused on their task. So again, this was a product preview of Non-Identical Sorting File Folders from TheAutismHelper.com.
