MASH: A fun way to get your categorization in.

Did you ever play MASH when you were a kid? MASH stood for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House and was a "fortune-telling" game that I played a lot in Elementary School. We'd find out who we were going to marry heeheehee, where we would live, what kind of pets and how many kids we would have.  Oh no! 120 kids again?

As it turns out, it's also a quick and easy categorization game to play in therapy. When I first started doing this game, I played it exactly the same as I had in elementary. I've since taken off the spouse category as I generally ended up being one of the choices and other teachers. It could get a little awkward.

Here's how you play:

1. Choose what categories you want.  You can be creative with this depending on what you want to work on with your clients.

2.  Have them list three examples for each category to address category naming skills.  

3.  Then you make the swirly shape until they tell you to stop.  You count up the number of lines on the swirly shape.  In the example above-there were five.  

4.  Then you count down the list crossing off every 5th (or whatever swirly shape number you come up with) until there is only one option left in the category.  

5.  This is their fortune.  Depending on their language needs, I might have them write a sentence for each prediction.  We might focus on:

• Sentence structure
• Question formulation (What will your favorite music be?) 
• Future tense forms (I will be a quarterback.)
• Clauses (When I get older, I will have 13 kids.)  

For older clients, I might help them organize the information into a paragraph format.

Have you used MASH in therapy?  What categories did you come up with?