A possible continuum could look like this; other orders may be suggested but they have to be argued for:

It is useful to ask the students to consider these signs as if they did not know the meaning. Could they guess the meaning? If so, such a sign would be transparent and thus towards the most highly iconic end of the scale. woman might be such a sign at that end since it indicates the breast of a woman. Subsequently, now taking the meaning into account, one could address the question which sign reflects the meaning most clearly? man refers to the goatee beard that many South African men have. It requires some cultural knowledge to see the iconicity here. The sign bus indicates the way people are holding on in a bus. Again cultural knowledge is necessary here to detect the iconicity. In the sign afternoon, the two hands refer to the position of the earth and the sun but this is not immediately obvious. This sign is therefore more towards the arbitrary end of the continuum. Still, there is no completely arbitrary sign amongst these four.

Note: an additional exercise on iconicity can be done by taking a series of signs and asking the student to determine the meaning and then discussing transparency. The slides below illustrate such an exercise. Here twelve videos were shown first in random order with no indication of the meaning. Once meaning had been established, the four signs with the same meaning were compared on the basis of three questions.