Beginning Sound B or M Sort Task Box

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 22 pages, 151 type-in fields

• 32 picture cards in 11 rounds across 3 levels (18 B words, 14 M words), 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, B WORDS and M WORDS, 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, 8 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 beginning-sound sort with the same data-and-graph system as the rest of the Task Box Collection: a child sorts pictures by their first sound, not by what the picture is a picture of, and every session lands on the data sheet behind it.

The Three Levels

• Level 1 — 4 rounds of two cards: one B word beside one M word, picked from unrelated topics so the first sound is the only thing to notice (a baseball and a magnet, a book and a mailbox). The first sorts are nearly impossible to get wrong.
• Level 2 — 4 rounds of three cards. The split varies (two M words and one B, or one and two), so a child looks at each card instead of counting.
• Level 3 — 3 rounds of four cards, cut as 2 × 2 blocks. The harder pairs live here: pictures from the same everyday topic that start with a different sound — a banana and bread next to a melon and milk; a bear, a bat and a beetle next to a monkey; a bee and a bird next to a moon and a mosquito — so a child has to listen to the word instead of guessing by what the pictures have in common. Splits run from one M word to three.

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 and nobody at a shared table can see who has the two-card rounds.

The Words

• B words (18): backpack, banana, baseball, basketball, bat, beans, bear, bee, beetle, bell, bicycle, bird, bone, book, bowl, box, bread, butterfly
• M words (14): magnet, mailbox, maracas, medal, melon, microphone, microscope, milk, monkey, moon, mosquito, motorcycle, mouse, music
• Mat icons (never cards): balloon, mushroom

This is the second box in the collection to carry each of these letters (after Beginning Sound B or S, and Beginning Sound M or T) — reusing a letter across pairings is normal beginning-sound practice, and the word banks were built and checked fresh rather than copied over: several plausible B pictures were checked and left out rather than stretched in, including a brick pattern whose black-and-white picture reads as a wall, a wrapped burrito whose ink-saver outline is not reliably distinct from a piece of candy, a cluster of berries that could as easily read as grapes or cherries once the color is gone, and a stick of butter that could as easily read as soap or cheese. Every picture that stayed was chosen to be named in one word, starting with the right letter, in color AND in the black-and-white set.

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. It does not teach letter names, letter formation or phoneme blending — it only sorts pictures by first sound. 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: cards placed in the right bin.

Who This Is For

Special education teachers and paraprofessionals running independent work stations, task box rotations or beginning-sound phonics practice 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.