Categorizing classifying are both thinking skills and they’re easy to confuse with one another. Here’s how to tell the difference and how to encourage the development of each skill.

Categorizing means sorting phenomena (stuff in general) into categories that work in that situation. Categories are specific and personal; they help you impose order.

For example, Joan may have a category of “errands I run on Saturday” or “things that belong in the cupboard on top of the fridge.” Selina may arrange her music into categories that are based on her musical tastes. Dave may decide to use the alphabet to categorize his CD’s. Although the alphabet is not his personal system, his decision to use it is.

Categorizing is one of the first thinking skills that little kids can master -and the first step in being able to sort and manage large volumes of information. As soon as kids can talk about the people, things, and activities in their world, they are ready to categorize with your assistance. For example, during clean-up time, toys can be categorized according to frequency of use or type, such as electronics, craft supply, and so on.

Always encourage your child to dream up categories too. Creating useful categories involves as much or more thinking than using someone else's categories.

Hanging out in the kitchen offers lots of opportunities to categorize. There’s a notable difference, for example, between “things we use to eat” and “things we eat.”

Here’s an easy craft idea for when your child is joining you in the kitchen.

Ask your child to think of some food categories, such as

• icky and yummy foods
• things we sprinkle on food
• foods by colour
• sweet and sour foods

These are just suggestions! Let your child think of her own categories. Using a large sheet of paper, create a place mat for someone at dinner to illustrate the categories. Help your child print her category titles on the page and section it off first.

This is a great thinking activity. Every time your child selects an item for her category she must figure out whether or not it actually fits.

Classifying involves sorting phenomena (stuff in general) into known, fixed classes. For example, let’s say someone gave you a 2-page article and asked you to classify the material as Introduction, Main Text, and Summary. You would need to look at the text and make inferences about the material in order to say which class the various sections of the text belonged to. You might infer, for example, that since the first paragraph came first and hinted at the contents of the article, it could be classified as part of the introduction.

Classifying is a key skill in reading and doing research because it allows kids to read selectively and zero in on

• what interests them
• what they need to learn
• what meets their specific research purpose
• what they can ignore

This is one reason why literacy experts are so interested in exposing kids to the print conventions used to organize books. If, as a reader, you can tell the difference between an interesting marginal tidbit and a bulleted list in which several key concepts are stated, then you will be able to read more quickly and understand more than someone who can’t figure out how the book works.

So that’s it. Categorizing and classifying are different thinking skills but both are important in different situations.