AM or PM? Daily Schedule Sort Task Box

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 22 pages

• 24 time picture cards in 9 rounds across 3 levels (12 AM times, 12 PM times), each round boxed to cut apart as a strip
• Every card twice: a full-color set for a laminated classroom box and a black-and-white ink-saver set for the photocopier
• 2 sort mats (color and ink-saver) with two labeled bins, AM and PM, six card slots each
• An answer key listing every round by level, plus the full word list
• A task box data sheet (16 rows: date, level, rounds given, cards correct, cards given, percent, help given, initials)
• A percent graph, 14 sessions across, with a level box under each session
• A filled example — an invented student, 6 sessions, every percent re-counted from its own row
• A family practice page with the same six cards and a mini mat
• A phrase bank: 25 lines in 6 groups (spoken lines for running the box, written starters for the note afterward)
• Start Here, a contents page with page thumbnails, and a "what's next" back page

A task box that comes with its own data. Most sort sets stop at the cards; this one adds the data sheet, the graph and the phrase bank behind them, so independent work practice turns into a line on a page a case manager can bring to a meeting.

HOW THE SORT WORKS — every card prints an ordinary digital time ("6:00") and one small picture above it: a sunrise or a crescent moon. The time itself never says AM or PM anywhere on the card — a sunrise means AM, a crescent moon means PM, and that is the only way to tell. A plain clock face cannot show this (the dial looks identical at 7 in the morning and 7 at night), so every card here carries the picture that actually does the job.

The Three Levels

• Level 1 — 5 rounds of two cards: an AM time beside a PM time from a clearly different hour, so the two pictures in a round are easy to tell apart. The first sorts are nearly impossible to get wrong.
• Level 2 — 2 rounds of three cards. One round carries two AM cards, so a child looks at each card's picture instead of counting.
• Level 3 — 2 rounds of four cards, cut as 2 × 2 blocks. Each round pairs the SAME hour twice — its AM card beside its PM card (7:00 next to 7:30, for example) — a genuine near-miss that asks a child to read the picture, not the number.

Nothing on a card says its level except a dot code in the corner (one, two or three dots), so a mixed-up box sorts itself back together.

The Words

• AM (12): 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 7:00, 7:15, 8:00, 8:45, 9:00, 9:15, 10:00, 10:15, 11:00
• PM (12): 1:30, 2:00, 3:45, 4:30, 5:15, 7:30, 8:15, 9:30, 9:45, 10:30, 11:30, 12:00
• Mat icons: sunrise (also every AM card's own picture), crescent moon (also every PM card's own picture) — the mat teaches the rule before a single card is sorted.

Every time string on this box is unique — no hour is ever printed the same way twice — so nothing can be sorted by matching a repeated number; the picture is the only reliable cue, confirmed directly against the module's own word list before this copy was written.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

It is a fillable PDF: type into the data sheet, the graph header, the family page and the example-style notes, or print and use a pen. The card pages and mats print on cardstock or plain paper and cut along dashed lines. It works offline with no account or subscription. It is NOT an editable online slideshow or word-processor document, and it is not a test of anything.

It carries no prompt hierarchy, fading schedule or mastery rule, and it does not decide what a percent means for a student or when to move up a level. The goal line and the criterion field are blanks for your district's own wording and your team's own number. It measures one thing: whether a time card is sorted by its sunrise or crescent moon picture, not by the time printed on it.

Who This Is For

Special education teachers and paraprofessionals running independent work stations or task box rotations with early or pre-reading students, case managers who need that practice to show up as data, and the families who get the practice page sent home.

More In The Collection

This is one set in the Task Box Collection; more sort and matching boxes are being added to the collection regularly, all on the same cards-plus-data shape.

Pictures (color pages): Noto Emoji by Google, Apache License 2.0. Pictures (ink-saver pages): Fluent Emoji, Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation, MIT License.