Bug or Bird Sort Task Box

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 22 pages, 151 type-in fields

• 24 picture cards in 9 rounds across 3 levels (11 bugs, 13 birds), 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, BUGS and BIRDS, 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 ("Owen"), 8 sessions, every percent re-counted from its own row
• A family practice page with 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

HOW THE SORT WORKS — every BUGS card is a small creepy-crawly (ant, bee, ladybug, butterfly, snail, worm and five more); every BIRDS card is a bird (owl, duck, chicken, parrot and nine more). Bugs and birds are both small animals a child sees outside, and several of each fly, so this pairing asks a child to look at the actual picture instead of guessing from a general shape — a real next step after the single-category "X vs Not X" boxes elsewhere in the collection.

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.

The Three Levels

• Level 1 — 4 rounds of two cards: one bug beside one bird (an ant and an owl, a ladybug and a chicken). The first sorts are nearly impossible to get wrong.
• Level 2 — 4 rounds of three cards. The split is not always one and two — one round carries two bug cards — so a child looks at each card instead of counting.
• Level 3 — 1 round of four cards, cut as a 2 × 2 block, split two bugs and two birds.

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 — both banks copied verbatim from two already-live Bright Path Sped sets, the Bugs vs Not Bugs and Birds vs Not Birds Sort Task Boxes, so every picture was already checked in color and in the black-and-white ink-saver set before this box existed

• Bugs (11): ant, bee, beetle, butterfly, cockroach, cricket, fly, ladybug, mosquito, snail, worm
• Birds (13): baby chick, chicken, dove, duck, eagle, flamingo, owl, parrot, peacock, penguin, rooster, swan, turkey
• Mat icons (never cards): bug, bird

No word repeats anywhere in the box, and the two 11- and 13-word banks are the same size as the two source products' own smaller sides, spent exactly across the 9 rounds (see the module docstring's word-count math). This is a smaller word bank than most of the collection's single-category boxes, on purpose: it reuses two already-thin, already-honest banks rather than inventing new words.

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: cards placed in the right bin.

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 of several sets 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. It is also a candidate for the Task Box Collection Bundle.

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