Task Card Tutorial Series: Making Any Set into a Mini Set!

OUR A/C IS FIXED!!!!  'Tis a glorious thing indeed!  Our temperature gauge did in fact reach 90 inside our house, so I was one happy lady when the A/C man came knocking on my door.  :)  This was my life until Wednesday.  Only it should've said "inside" as well!

My students are obsessed with task cards.  I don't know what it is about them that make 12-year-olds go wild.  Maybe it's because it's not a worksheet, so they suddenly think their lives have a bit more freedom.  Ha!  I love them for a million reason (which you'll see in the last post of the series), but I really love using them in small groups and reteach groups.  One of my biggest reasons for continuing to use task cards in my classroom is because they provide a very easy form of differentiation.  I usually spread them out all over the room and make a rule that only three people can be at one card at a time (otherwise every card's a party which means only 2 problems get solved in the class time).  This allows those students who find the topic really easy to accomplish a lot, while I can monitor and pull kids that I see having a tough time.  Sometimes I'll wander around with the answer key checking what they've already completed quickly to see where they're at, and I'll pull kids that way.  Other times I pull them based on what I saw earlier in class or from their homework.  I don't do it the same way each day - so official, I know.  Anyway, the task cards are great for me to use at the back table because one question at a time is WAY less overwhelming than 30 problems glaring at a student who doesn't fully understand.  In fact, I find that a lot of my students perk up and start wandering over after I've helped a few with a statement like, "I am having a bit of trouble on this problem, and I heard you talking about it.  Could you help me on this part?"  Um...yes?!  It's good stuff, guys.

A mini-card next to the regular task card

I really like to have two sets of task cards so that I don't have to search around the room for the card I need, but sometimes printing two sets of cards gets spendy with ink, paper and lamination, so I like to make "mini-sets."  I first read about the idea from Mary at Teaching with a Mountain View/Teaching with Task Cards, and her tutorial is VERY easy to follow, and you can read about it HERE!

Tiny little cards!

Not only do they save me a bit of $$, but my students (okay, let's be real, the girls) think they're just the cutest little cards that you ever did see.  I sent a mini set home with a student who was absent once, and she was pretty excited that she got to take the mini-cards home!  Those little things...

Are these not the cutest things ever?

Do you make mini-sets?  What's you're favorite use for them?

The set featured in these photos is my Translating Algebraic Expressions set which is available in my TpT store here!