A to Z, Jr. is one of my favorite categorizing games because, not only does it encourage children to name items in very specific categories, but it also helps them to increase their phonemic awareness skills at the same time. 

This game is very simple for children to play and exciting at the same time since students complete against each other as they try to be the first to cover up all of the letters in the alphabet. A to Z, Jr. comes with 4 colorful, plastic game boards, red plastic marker chips, a timer, and a whole list of category cards.

The categories range from the very simple, such as colors to more complicated such as animals with spots.  A to Z, Jr. is one of my favorite categorizing games because, not only does it help children to come up with items in very specific categories quickly, but it also helps to increases phonemic awareness and sound/symbol association by encouraging students to think about the letters that spoken words begin with.    

Because A to Z, Jr. has so many different types of categories, it lends itself well to both speech and language therapy.  This game is also a good one for parents to play with their children at home since older siblings can be encouraged to answer the more challenging questions and younger students can answer the easier ones. 

The only problem is that there are not really enough cards.  The solution to this problem is to “steal” cards from your other category games, such as Outburst, Outburst, Jr., or Scattegories.   

In addition, this game has one a bunch of awards, such as:

• Dr. Toy 100 Best Children’s Products 2004
• 2004 iParenting Media Award Winner
• 2004 Creative Child Magazine Preferred Choice Award Winner

This game comes with 4 colorful, plastic games boards, each with every letter in the alphabet on it, 100 plastic disks, 56 category cards, a flip over timer, and 1 die.  In many ways this game is similar to Outburst and Outburst, Jr. but the letter boards complicate the categorization task since students are only allowed to cover up the letters for which they can name an item in one of their chosen categories. 

For example, one of the categories in this game is:  ANIMALS WITH STRIPES.  If the students names Zebra and Monkey, he is able to cover up the Z and M respectively on his letter board whereas if he names Giraffe he would cover up the G (not the J).  Another category is LAKES.  For this topic, the student might come up with Superior for which he would cover up the S space and Michigan.  However, if he has already covered up the M space when he named a Monkey, he cannot cover up a space for that particular lake.    

A to Z, Jr. is a fantastic game for your students who are reluctant talkers because so much of You'll need to know more than just your ABCs in this alphabetically zany game! In fact, you'll need to be pretty quick with the entire alphabet, including those pesky XYZs! Players roll a die, and then have 30 seconds to list as many different answers for a specific category as possible.