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The Card Sort Challenge Teambuilder

by admin

I recently found a great beginning of semester teambuilding activity called the card sort challenge and I used it in my math classes on the first day of the second semester this year. It serves a very similar purpose as the 100 Numbers activity made famous by Sara Van Der Werf and in fact I easily achieved 100% student participation in all of my classes with both activities.

my students working together on the card sort challenge

I change my student groups every unit and each time, I give students an opportunity to meet their new group members and also work together on a low stakes task. The card sort challenge was really fun for the students and it was great to see each group smiling and laughing together.

here are the rules of the game (I modified the rules a bit from the original that you can find here):

  1. pass out one deck of playing cards to each group
  2. instruct students to shuffle their deck of cards. I started by asking students to raise their hands if they knew how to shuffle and most groups had at least one person raise their hand. For groups who did not have a person who knew how to shuffle I demonstrated multiple ways of shuffling the cards at the front of the class.
  3. Tell students you will give them five minutes to sort the cards in order by number and suit (I find it makes it easier to show them example of what that looks like):
  4. Give them 5 minutes to get all of the cards in the correct order.
  5. After the 5 minutes you can either give the remaining groups still working more time or debrief as a class. This is a great time for students to share their strategies with the class. Highlight the strategies that involved working together on the task and tell students this is the expectation every day in class.
  6. I follow Sara Van Der Werf’s suggestion of taking a photo to remind them what group collaboration looks like in math class in later lessons.

On the day after this challenge I started Unit 5 of the Open Up Resources curriculum and the participation and engagement from the activity definitely carried over. Let me know how it went for you in the comments below.