Farm or Forest Animals? Sort Task Box

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 22 pages

• 24 picture cards in 9 rounds across 3 levels (12 farm animals, 12 forest animals), 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, FARM and FOREST, six card slots each
• An answer key listing every round by level, plus the full word list
• A task box data sheet (date, level, rounds given, cards correct, cards given, percent, help given, initials)
• A percent graph, with a level box under each session
• A filled example — an invented student ("Priya"), 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 FARM card is an animal a child might meet at a farm (cow, pig, sheep, duck, goose and seven more); every FOREST card is an animal that lives in the woods (owl, hedgehog, bear, deer, badger and seven more). Farm and forest animals are both animals a child meets in picture books, and several pairs share a general shape, so this pairing asks a child to look at the actual animal 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 farm animal beside one forest animal (a cow and an owl, a pig and a hedgehog). 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 farm cards, two rounds carry two forest 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 farm animals and two forest animals.

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 from two already-live Bright Path Sped sets, the Farm vs Wild Animals and Forest Animals vs Not Sort Task Boxes, so every picture was already checked in color and in the black-and-white ink-saver set before this box existed

• Farm (12): chick, cow, duck, goat, goose, horse, llama, pig, rabbit, rooster, sheep, turkey
• Forest (12): badger, bear, beaver, chipmunk, deer, hedgehog, moose, otter, owl, raccoon, skunk, wolf
• Mat icons (never cards): tractor, tree

"Rabbit" sits on the FARM side only — its home category in both source sets. "Fox" was left out of the FOREST side on purpose: its ink-saver picture did not clearly read as a fox at card size, so it was dropped rather than shipped with a card that might teach the wrong word; the FOREST side runs 12 words here (two fewer than that sibling's own 14) and FARM was kept at its own 12 so the two sides land even. No word repeats anywhere in this 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 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.