Loud or Quiet Sort Task Box

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 22 pages

• 23 picture cards in 8 rounds across 3 levels (11 that make a loud sound, 12 that make a quiet sound or no sound at all), 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, LOUD SOUNDS and QUIET SOUNDS, 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 ("Theo"), 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 — this box does not sort "loud things" from "quiet things" as a fixed trait; it sorts pictures of things that make a loud sound (a drum, a trumpet, an alarm clock) from pictures of things that make a quiet sound, or none at all (a snail, a moon, a candle). A child listens for the sound the picture stands for and places the card in the bin for that sound — not a guess about what kind of object it is.

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 — 3 rounds of two cards: one thing that makes a loud sound beside one that makes a quiet sound (a drum and a snail, fireworks and the moon). 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 loud-sound cards — so a child looks at each card instead of counting.
• Level 3 — 1 round of five cards, cut in a single row: two near-miss pairs from the same everyday setting (a dog and a mouse, an alarm clock and a candle) plus a rooster, so a child has to think about the actual sound instead of guessing from the picture's category.

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 — checked against Unicode's own name for the picture and confirmed present in both the color and the black-and-white ink-saver art sets before use

• Makes a loud sound (11): drum, trumpet, bell, fireworks, alarm clock, lion, dog, airplane, thunder cloud, megaphone, rooster
• Makes a quiet sound, or none (12): snail, moon, feather, butterfly, book, cloud, turtle, leaf, star, mouse, fish, candle
• Mat icons (never cards): loudspeaker, muted speaker

Two words proposed for the loud side were left out on purpose: a flashing police light is a picture of something SEEN, not heard, so it never honestly tested "makes a loud sound"; a guitar has no default volume the way a drum or an alarm clock does, and an honest example (a guitar played softly) would make the claim false. Ten solid loud-sound words ship rather than twelve with two debatable ones. On the quiet side, "sheep" was swapped for "fish": a sheep close by can bleat loudly, which would make "quiet" false for a real case, not just an edge one; a fish is silent the same uncontested way a snail or a moon is. 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, SLPs and paraprofessionals running independent work stations, auditory-discrimination practice 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.