Creating a Card-Sort Activity

I’ve been working with my grade 6 and 7 students on reading informational texts. I generally use a set of comprehension questions to help them navigate the text, make connections between the information and their prior experience, and to get insight into their level of understanding. There is definitely a bias towards written output, so it’s not the idea approach for gauging students’ understanding.

I decided to try a card-sort activity to get students applying information from a text about techniques for separating mixtures. Here’s the prompt I used to generate the cards:

Create a card-sort activity in which students will classify 16-20 real world examples of separating mixtures as either as either filtration, distillation, crystallization or chromatography. For each card, provide a short title, a 1-2 sentence description written in student-friendly language. Provide enough detail that that the students could classify each card as either filtration, distillation, crystallization or chromatography, but do not specify the type of filtration in the description. Present the cards in a table with a row for each separation technique. There must be at least 3 examples for each separation technique.

It would be pretty easy to swap out the details to generate any number of classification activities: types of chemical reactions, types of triangles, genres of literature, parts of speech.

Create a card-sort activity in which students will classify <number> real world examples of <topic> as either as either <list categories>. For each card, provide a short title, a 1-2 sentence description written in student-friendly language. Provide enough detail that that the students could classify each card as either <list categories>, but do not specify the type of <topic> in the description. Present the cards in a table with a row for each <topic>. There must be at least 3 examples for each <topic>.

What of topics do you teach that might work well with an activity like this?