Word Game: Categories Game with a Twist

Wednesday’s Words: Categorization Puzzles

This week’s Wednesday’s Words is another categorization game with yet another twist.  Like last week’s Wednesday’s Words, in the following challenge you will be given a category and you will think of words that fit in each particular category.  Let’s take that up another notch.  For each category, you must come up with at least one word that starts with and one that ends with each of the letters in the word G A M E S.

For example, if your category was SCHOOL you might come up with:
Geography / StudyinG
Art / DramA
Music / GymnasiuM
Earth Science /. LecturE
Smart Board / RecesS

The goal is to stretch your thinking so be creative! If you get stuck and are struggling for a word, it is perfectly acceptable to search lists like this one http://www.scrabblefinder.com. Pay attention to which letters, topics, and letter position (first or last) were most challenging for you.

PUZZLE #1:
Your category is TRAVEL.
G
A
M
E
S

PUZZLE #2:
Your category is FOOD.
G
A
M
E
S

PUZZLE #3:
Your category is ANIMALS.

G
A
M
E
S

What was easy? What was most difficult? Did you find yourself using any kind of thinking strategy?

Wednesday’s Words: Filling Your Categories for Better Word Finding

This week’s Wednesday’s Words is a down and dirty brain exercise intended to help you combat the struggle to find the right word.   Sorry — no fun and games this week!

The traditional view of memory was this:   we have a huge filing cabinet that stores everything we need to know.   According to this view, the filing system comes with an easy to use retrieval system that allows us to pull information out when we need it.    Oh if it were only that simple!

We now know that we store information in classes or categories.   We have spoken in previous posts about the benefits of chunking in  increasing your short-term, working memory capacity.   Long-term memory also uses a similar kind of organizational system – a concept called categorization.    We store memories most effectively in categories and the deeper the category, the more likely we are to find successful ways to describe things.

Finding that right word or name requires a good, fully stocked storage system.   The more pieces of information you have in a category and the more associations you have in that section of the filing cabinet,  the better your chances of pulling something out that describes what you are trying to say.

This exercise will help you build broader categories.   Below you will find a list of words from Merriam Webster’s list of most used common nouns.   Challenge yourself to find 5 synonyms and 5 antonyms for each word.