Patterned activities and teaching understanding of object labels:

Patterned activities can be used as a vehicle to teach understanding and expression of object labels.  To support comprehension of a specific object label, when doing a simple giver/puter activity in which one person gives and the other person puts, the adult can choose to use one type of object (e.g. plates or forks).  When the adult gives the object to the child, she would say the label after the child takes the object.  In this way,  the child hears the object label as he comes in contact with the object.  Given that a giver/puter pattern activity involves multiple exemplars of the the same type of object, the child would hear the word repeated multiple times across multiple exemplars of the item. Since multiple exemplars are used as opposed to the exact same object, the child would learn that the label applies to a class of objects as opposed to a specific object. In this way, generalization is built into the teaching of understanding of the object label. After multiple days of exposure to a single label, the giver/puter activity could be designed to include sorting. Two objects, for which the child has had exposure as described above, could be used.  That is, the child would have a bin on each side of him.  The adult would give the child one of two types of objects, label the object, and the child would sort, i.e., put the object in the appropriate bin.  In this way, the child would now hear the object labels in contrast to each other, thereby fostering a higher level of comprehension.