How To Group Students
There are many different ways to group students such as mixed ability grouping and ability grouping. The following resource help make grouping easy and fun!
Mixed Ability Student Groups
Mixed ability groups can benefit children in a variety of ways. There’s not the stigma attached to being in the “low group” or the “high group”. Also, the children can reinforce their own learning by sharing what they know with each other. A fun strategy to assign mixed ability groups is to use “pick a partner cards”.
Pick a Partner Cards
How To Play – Give each student a card and instruct them to find the partner with the matching cards. For example, the student with the “pepper” will partner up with the student that has “salt”.
These cards have the theme “We go together like..”.
I’ve made a few different sets of pick a partner cards. You can choose from a food, community or household items theme.
Pick a Group Cards
The cards shown below help you to group students. The group sizes can vary between two and ten students. The themes include animals and colors.
You can grab the Pick a Partner cards here or by clicking on the picture below.
Ability Student Groups
Ability grouping is often used to group students who are working at a similar pace. The benefit of ability grouping is that it makes it easy to create differentiated learning experiences. The downside is that kids may get stuck in a particular group or be influenced with stigmas such as being in the “low group”. How you group students really comes down to teacher judgement and your instinct about what will best help your students.
If you use ability student groups you may find these “Groups Sorted” resources useful.
These resources are editable and include group planners, labels and group charts. Some easy ways to name groups are:
* Group 1, Group 2, Group 3 etc
* Green Group, Yellow Group, Red Group etc
* Team 1, Team 2, Team 3 etc
* Group names nominated by the students
You can grab these Groups Sorted resources here or by clicking on the picture below.
Other Useful Resources
If you like setting up learning centers you may also find these editable labels useful.
You can check out them out here or by clicking on the picture below.
Happy teaching! :)