Card Sort (Collaborative Learning)

OVERVIEW

This is a collaborative activity that can be used to teach concepts, classification characteristics, facts about objects, or review information. The physical movement featured can help to energize a tired class.

PROCEDURE

1.  Give each students an index card containing information or an example that fits into one or more categories. Here are some examples:

• Types of deciduous trees vs. types of evergreen

• Characters in various Shakespearean plays

• Powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government

• Symptoms of different illnesses

• Information that fits into varied parts of a job resume

• The characteristics of different metals

• Nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions

• Books by Dickens, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Updike

2.  Ask students to mill around the room and find others whose card fits the same category. (You may announce the categories beforehand or let students discover them.)

3.  Have students with cards in the same category present themselves to the rest of the class.

4.  As each category is presented, make any teaching points you think are important.

VARIATIONS

1.  Ask each group to make a teaching presentation about its category.

2.  At the beginning of the activity, form teams. Give each team a complete set of cards. Be sure they are shuffled so that the categories into which they are to be sorted are not obvious. Ask each team to sort the cards into categories. Each team can obtain a score for the number of cards sorted correctly.