If your household is anything like mine, then you would have a huge pile of left over Woolworths Aussie Animal trading cards. (Or any of the other sets that Woolworths has put out since the Animal Cards success). What to do with them. Give them to the neighbors kids to complete their sets, but them what? Well here is a great resource for you to use in your classroom to help form groups or as a way of randomly selecting students for various activities.
The teachers at my school now have a packet of cards which they give out to the class to get them into random groups. The groups can be formed by the animal on the card, the number range, the area (Backyard, Desert etc).
It is also possible to organise multiple groups within the same lesson. For example, the first grouping may be all students with the same animal. The second grouping may be all the students with a card numbered 1 – 10, 11-20, 21-30 etc. The third alternative may be all students with similar regions. (Deseart, Backyard, etc). They can also be used for ice breaker activities at the beginning of a school year.
Another way I have recently used them was to select students to present their work to the class. This was done by selecting only enough cards for the number of students and ensuring there were not two numbers the same. This works well because they don’t know what will be used to select the first student to the last. Could it be the card with the highest number first or the lowest. Could it be the animal which is first in the alphabet or last. It became a bit of a game with all the students going around to see if they could fine a card lower then theirs.
You may be able to create your own groups depending on the numbers of cards you have spare.