Practice Structures: Card Sorts

Card sorts are one of my absolute favorite practice structures. My favorite way to use them is to practice vocabulary or categorization. You can also use card sorts as a matching activity (question matched with answer) as well as ordering (order the steps in a procedure or solution) and grouping multiple representations (graph with a table with function form etc).


Some times I like to provide the categories and sometimes I like to allow students to group and regroup while making their own categories. For example, you could give students several parabola graphs. Maybe learners would group based on the number of zeros or the opening direction.

You could create the card sort with paper and pencil or digitally. If you choose digital, you should check out Desmos activity builder for sure. You can also check out the Desmos Activity Bank for more.

Today in #alg2chat we used a @Desmos card sort to practice factoring sum/difference of cubes #teach180 pic.twitter.com/JnGrlX5E5b

— Jennifer Abel (@abel_jennifer) October 10, 2016

If you are making a physical card sort, I recommend using Google slides and making each slide a card or one page of a Google doc per card. Then you can print four slides/pages to a sheet and end up with nice sized cards.

A pro tip for physical cards is to print each set of cards in a sort on a different color. For example, You may be tempted to put all of the bias sorts on one color and all of the variables sorts on another. This makes it easier for you to know that on the given day you are handing each group the correct sort (say the purple bias cards vs the orange variables cards). However, kids will inevitably drop cards on the floor. After class, you will find one lonely card on the ground and have no idea which set it does with. So if each set of the bias card is a different color, it makes it much easier to see which group the missing card came from.

Another pro tip is to leave some of the cards blank. Laminate the cards and have learners write in the missing info on the blank cards. Here is an example from the Mathematics Assessment Project. This site has some awesome resources in general, so take some time to explore!

Here are a few card sorts to get you started.

Statistics
Bias in Samples and Surveys
Individuals Types of Variables

Geometry
Isometries
Conic Sections
Quadrilaterals
Negation, Inverse, Contrapositive
Segments of Triangles

Algebra
Completing the Square
Quotients involving Exponents - Matching

As usual, I welcome your questions, comments, and compliments :)