O'Clock or Half Past? Sort Task Box

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 22 pages

• 24 clock-face picture cards in 9 rounds across 3 levels (12 o'clock, 12 half past), 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, O'CLOCK and HALF PAST, 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, 6 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

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.

HOW THE SORT WORKS — every card is a clock face with two hands and no printed numbers, the way the standard clock-face symbols are drawn. An O'CLOCK card always has its long hand pointing straight up; a HALF PAST card always has its long hand pointing straight down. That one rule holds on every card in both sets, so a child sorts by hand position, not by reading a number.

The Three Levels

• Level 1 — 5 rounds of two cards: an o'clock time beside a half-past time from a different hour, so the two clocks in a round are easy to tell apart. The first sorts are nearly impossible to get wrong.
• Level 2 — 2 rounds of three cards. One round carries two o'clock cards, so a child looks at each card instead of counting.
• Level 3 — 2 rounds of four cards, cut as 2 × 2 blocks. Each round pairs the SAME hour twice — its o'clock card beside its half past card (7:00 next to 7:30, for example) — a genuine near-miss that asks a child to read the long hand, not just recognize the hour.

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.

THIS IS A SHORTER BOX THAN THE COLLECTION'S USUAL SIZE. Only 24 clock-face symbols exist to draw from — one per hour, o'clock and half past — so this box ships honestly at 24 cards / 9 rounds instead of the collection's usual 72 cards / 26 rounds, the same floor Heavy or Light and Long or Short shipped at.

The Words

• O'Clock (12): 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, 9:00, 10:00, 11:00, 12:00
• Half Past (12): 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, 4:30, 5:30, 6:30, 7:30, 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, 11:30, 12:30
• Mat icons (never cards): alarm clock, mantel clock

Every clock face was rendered and looked at in color AND in the black-and-white set before it went in the box; the long-hand rule (up for o'clock, down for half past) reads clean and consistent at card size in both sets. This box does not teach reading a clock's hour numeral — no clock face here prints one — it teaches the one visual distinction between "on the hour" and "half past," which is what the sort actually tests.

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 set 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.

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