Do you sort cards???

This strategy is a great one for sharing ideas and building vocabulary.  It takes minimum prep work and materials, too!  All you need are index cards and markers or pencils.

Here's what to do:

Students work by themselves to generate words or phrases that come to mind when they think of a certain topic.  They record these words on separate index cards. 

Then in a small group, students share the words they thought of and eliminate duplicates.

Students then sort the ideas into categories - the categories can be created by the students or the teacher.

Finally after the groups are done, take a walk around the room to see what each group has sorted. 

As a whole class, debrief....what did you notice? what surprised you? what would you change?


What does it look like in a real classroom???  I used it this week as a review before an end of unit test....

1. I asked the kids to brainstorm as many words and/or phrases as they could think of about the Civil War.  They could use their notebooks for support.
2.  Next, they worked in the group to eliminate duplicates.
3.  I gave them the categories to sort by -   North, South, West Virginia, Battles, Leaders, and Roles of Virginians.
4.  Then we did the gallery walk and debrief.

Total time was about 20 minutes...we made lots of connections across categories too!