Make Your Students into Human Task Cards

Hey everybody.  I wanted to share a fun tip with you on how to shake things up in your classroom when it comes to having your students work on a new skill you've taught.  Worksheets can get pretty boring after a while and my students often get antsy.  I have been using task cards with my students for the last two years now.  It's a great way to add some movement to their activities.  For my 5th graders, though, sometimes even task cards become a little monotonous so I wanted to try something different.

In my newest product, Divisibility Detective, I have an activity where each of my students becomes a number.  They walk around the room and meet other "numbers"and complete the divisibility task.  How do they know their numbers?  To give them their numbers, I actually printed them onto shipping labels so that my students could wear them just like name tags.  The shipping labels are 2" x 4" and come 10 to a page.  I had to format my page to make sure they printed correctly.  I decided to give it the detective theme to make it a little more exciting and fun.

Once my students had their name tags on and were given a recording sheet, they set out to find friends in the room, write down their number, and then test each one for the divisibility rules of 2, 3, 5, 6, 9. and 10.  I also gave some students a recording sheet that included 4 and 8 to challenge them.

Here's what it looked like in my classroom today:

The best part about this activity is that it can be done with ANYTHING.  You can create other math task cards (or language arts) and print them onto labels.  Instead of having students going to a desk for a task card and working alone, students have to approach each other and interact.  They also have to go up to students in the class that they may not normally speak to.

We had a lot of fun practicing our divisibility rules today and I'm excited to use this approach in some upcoming activities as well.  To see the rest of my Divisibility Detective activities, check out the product HERE.