Grouping Students | 5 Ways
When you put 20+ students in a single elementary classroom with only one, main instructor… What do you get?
A lot of different learning needs.
How do you meet all of these needs? By not teaching all of the kids at the same time in the same way all of the time. Sometimes you need to break them up. Sometimes you need to let them teach each other. Sometimes you need to teach one group one thing and a different group a totally different thing.
Today, I want to share with you five different ways to group your students. Hopefully from this article you can gain a new idea for partnering in grouping students in your classroom!
Sticky Hands
Sticky hands is a totally mindless, zero prep game. My favorite kind. I actually didn’t think that sticky hands was anything special until a principal observed it in the lesson and wrote a staff email that afternoon about how I had ‘let every student have a voice at the same time, and created variety in my pairings.’
And I realized that’s what I was doing!
Basically, all you do is you have the kids raise their right hand and walk silently around the room. When you yell sticky hands they have to hi5 the person closest to them. Sometimes kids have to move around a little bit to find a partner if they’re clumped in an odd number. But after a minute everyone is partnered off with someone totally random, because again they had to partner with the person standing closest to them!
Once their hands are stuck together you give the question or prompt you want them to discuss. I usually use this as an exit conversation from a lesson. You can review a skill that you just discussed, or you can use this as a getting to know you icebreaker game the first few weeks of school.
After the question is answered, the kids unstick their hands and silently walk around again. You can do two or three rounds and you can guarantee that the kids will have worked with some people that they typically don’t work with.
Pick-a-Partner Cards
I bought this set on TPT my second or third year of teaching. I laminated them and have used them every year without fail. They are perfect. I just pull out enough cards for each of my kids at the beginning of the year and put them somewhere with easy access. When I want to switch up how we choose partners for group work or an activity, I shuffle the cards, put them facedown and pass them out blindly to the kids. They have to then flip their card up and find the partner. Peanut butter goes with jelly, macaroni goes with cheese, cookies go with milk… and it goes on. They are adorable and pretty effortless.
Disclaimer: if you have an odd number of students in your class, you will need to plan to keep one of the cards for yourself so that you can partner up with the kid and then usher them into a group of three or work with them yourself.
Another disclaimer: The kids think I pass these out totally blind, but if there is a tense situation in my classroom amongst some students, I will make sure that I put some cards that are not pairs with each other at the top and pass them out to those kids first to make sure that they aren’t partnered up with each other. The nice thing about these cards, is you can manipulate the partnerships without your kids even knowing.
Mathematical Categories
Another way I liked to put students in small groups for random activities and labs was to group students by category. Typically my students had a number assigned to them that was based off of their spot on my roster. I would use these numbers for all kinds of things, and grouping was one of them.
Split the room by putting odd numbers on one team and even on the other.
Put students in random, heterogenous groups by asking all of the multiples of 3 to get in a group, then all multiples of 5 in another. You can subtly work in that math thinking while also partnering students up in random ways.
Partner Flip-Ups
These partner flip-ups are just a little freebie that I offer in my store simply because they are easy, and an effective solution for pre-selecting who will work with who.
You can edit these to have subjects on them or times if you want your students to practice their telling time skills! Essentially, each of the four quadrants gets a label and you cut those quadrants to flip up and review a partner name underneath.
This is a great solution if you have a class with a lot of different needs and you want to control who works with who. I typically only use something like this for centers. I want the kids to have some safe names to go to if they need a partner and I want to make sure that I have paired empathetic students with students who need extra help when I’m not available.
You can display these on student desks, so they have set partners all of the time, or you can keep them in folders and have the students pull them out when you have a substitute or some other activity where you need to make sure that everyone is working with someone they get along with.
By Data
This one is obvious. If you are going to put students in instructional groups, you should have some data to back up your decision. This is not the same thing as pairing students together for a quick icebreaker activity like with a round of sticky hands. Instead, data formed groups are going to remain the same for a longer stretch of time because all of the kids in the group are striving for a similar goal. I have an entire blog post about my small group planner and how I use data to set up and reevaluate my small groups throughout the year. If that interests you click here to read more.
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