Bugs vs Not Bugs 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 not bugs), 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 NOT BUGS, 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

HOW THE SORT WORKS — every BUGS card is an insect or another small crawling creature most classrooms call a bug (ant, bee, ladybug, worm, snail and six more); every NOT BUGS card is an ordinary object, or the one deliberate look-alike, a spider. A spider is an arachnid, not an insect, so this box keeps it on the NOT BUGS side on purpose — Level 3 uses it to check that a child is looking at the picture, not sorting from habit.

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 obviously-not-a-bug thing (an ant and a car, a ladybug and a chair). The first sorts are nearly impossible to get wrong.
• Level 2 — 4 rounds of three cards. The split is not always one and two — two rounds carry 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. One bug beside three not-bugs, including the spider look-alike.

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

• Bugs (11): ant, bee, beetle, butterfly, cockroach, cricket, fly, ladybug, mosquito, snail, worm
• Not bugs (13): backpack, balloon, bike, book, car, chair, clock, drum, hat, key, kite, shoe, spider
• Mat icons (never cards): bug, ball

This is a smaller word bank than most of the collection — 11 clean, checked bug words, just under the collection's usual ~12-word floor, because a twelfth genuine insect word (scorpion was the original candidate) does not exist as a clean, honest fit: a scorpion is an arachnid, the same animal family as the spider this box deliberately keeps out of the BUGS side, so keeping scorpion in would have taught two different rules for the same fact. The box is sized and priced the same as the collection's other honestly-smaller sets (Flies vs Not Flies, Beginning Sound F or L). Every picture was chosen to be named in one word by a young child, in color AND in the black-and-white set; a word that failed in either set was left out of both, and no word repeats anywhere in the box.

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 sold as part of the Task Box Collection Bundle, at a savings over buying the sets separately.

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