Forest or Ocean Animals? Sort Task Box

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 22 pages

• 26 picture cards in 10 rounds across 3 levels (13 forest animals, 13 ocean 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, FOREST and OCEAN, 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 ("Maya"), 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 FOREST card is an animal that lives in the forest (badger, beaver, chipmunk, deer, fox and eight more); every OCEAN card is an animal that lives in the ocean (fish, penguin, dolphin, crab, shark and eight more). Both bins are real, positive categories — this is not a "which one is really an animal" test — so it asks a child to look at where an animal lives, not just what kind of creature it is. 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 — 5 rounds of two cards: one forest animal beside one ocean animal (a badger and a fish, a beaver and a penguin). 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 forest animal cards, two rounds carry two ocean animal 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 forest animals and two ocean 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 verbatim from two already-live Bright Path Sped sets, the Forest Animals vs Not and Ocean vs Land Animals Sort Task Boxes, so every picture was already checked in color and in the black-and-white ink-saver set before this box existed

• Forest (13): badger, bear, beaver, chipmunk, deer, fox, hedgehog, moose, owl, rabbit, raccoon, skunk, wolf
• Ocean (13): crab, dolphin, fish, jellyfish, lobster, octopus, otter, penguin, seal, shark, shrimp, squid, turtle
• Mat icons (never cards): tree, boat

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.