Safe Body and Safe Hands Sort Cards and Lesson

About this resource

EVERYTHING INSIDE — 24 pages, 199 type-in fields

• 10 action cards sorted into two columns: Safe Actions (handshake, hug, clapping, thumbs up, walking, cheering) and Actions That Hurt (hitting, pinching, pushing, kicking)
• Three sort-board levels on the same 10-card deck: Level 1 errorless (four cards matched to a faint picture already on the mat), Level 2 the standard open sort (all 10 cards, no hints), Level 3 word-only column headers plus a line to write in one more real example per column
• The full deck printed twice — a full-color set and a black-and-white ink-saver set, each split across two pages of five cards with its own "at a glance" reference table naming every card's word, column and what it shows
• 12 blank sort cards with a type-in line, for any action the 10 printed cards do not cover
• A how-to page: before the first sort, how the three levels work, what every card shows and does not show (no card pictures an outcome or a second person), writing down what changes
• A Sorting Practice Log (16 rows: date, level used, cards sorted, cards correct, notes)
• A weekly roll-up (8 weeks) with a percent-correct graph
• A filled example — an invented student, one school week on the log (moving across all three levels) and three weeks on the roll-up, every number re-counted from its own row
• A family page with three of the ten cards and a week of home practice tracking
• A hand-off page so a paraprofessional or a general education teacher runs the same board the same way, with a blank line for the team's own next-step rule
• A phrase bank: 22 lines in 6 groups (spoken words for each sort, written starters for the log, the roll-up and the note home)
• A storage and binder label sheet with a binder spine strip
• Start Here, a contents page with page thumbnails, and a "what's next" back page

Most "hands to self" resources on this shelf are a single narrative story read start to finish. This one is a SORT: a shared deck of ten concrete action cards and a two-column board at three built-in levels — errorless matching, the standard open sort, and a word-only reading step up — so the same deck works for a student just starting to tell safe from unsafe and one ready to read the column and add their own example, with a practice log and roll-up behind it.

The Two Columns And Their Cards

• Safe Actions — handshake, hug, clapping, thumbs up, walking, cheering
• Actions That Hurt — hitting, pinching, pushing, kicking

Every "Actions That Hurt" card pictures the action alone — a hand, a fist, a foot — never an outcome, a mark, or a second person; no card anywhere in this file shows one person hurting another or any named individual. "Hitting" is a boxing glove rather than a bare fist, because a bare fist reads as "fist" or "fist bump," not the action, in testing against this collection's own nameability standard. Every picture was rendered and read at print size in color AND in the black-and-white set before it went on a card, and six of the ten (handshake, hug, clapping, thumbs up, walking, cheering) carry forward an identical picture and word already used on a sibling product in this collection.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

It is a fillable PDF: type into the sort boards, the practice log, the roll-up, the family page, the hand-off page and the blank sort cards, or print and use a pen. The card pages print on cardstock or plain paper; the cards cut along dashed lines. It works offline with no account or subscription. It is NOT an editable online slideshow or word-processor document.

It is a way to sort everyday actions into two columns at a level that fits the student, and keep a record of what was sorted, how. It is not a behavior plan, a discipline procedure, an eligibility tool, or a therapy protocol, and it names no clinical finding. It carries no prompt hierarchy, fading schedule or mastery rule, and it promises no outcome. Your district's own rule for what happens after an "Actions That Hurt" card is sorted for real is not part of this file — the hand-off page has a blank line for your team's own wording. How fast a student should move between the three levels is your own team's judgment.

It is different from the store's Keeping My Hands to Myself Social Story, which is a six-sentence narrative read start to finish, not a sort. This file is broader than hands alone (it includes a foot card and a whole-body walking card) and uses a sort board instead of a story.

Who This Is For

Special education teachers, paraprofessionals and case managers working on safe-body discrimination skills with concrete, everyday action pictures, and the families who get the home page sent home.

More In The Collection

Part of the Visual Supports Collection, alongside Keeping My Hands to Myself Social Story, Expected vs Unexpected Behavior Sort Cards, and Categorization and Sorting Visual Cue Cards; more picture-card sets are being added to the collection regularly, all on the same cards-plus-data shape. Many of this collection's single picture-card sets are packaged into themed bundles at 35% off (each keeps its own file) -- see the store for the current bundles.

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