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Ashley and I have recently visited a Birmingham CLC (City Learning Centre) where we demonstrated Bingo and Word Problems with year four and five pupils. For the bingo game we needed to spilt the pupils into two groups to enable them to play against each other in the two player mode.

This inspired me to share some ideas of how to split pupils into groups. All these ways are random and therefore produce mixed ability groups. In advance of using any of these ideas, decide how many groups are required and how many pupils per group

• Use a pack of playing cards to set groups. For example if you need to split the pupils into six groups of four pupils you could randomly give out all suits for cards 2-7. Pupils need to find other pupils with the same card number as themselves until all suits have been found.

• Coloured pencils. Grab some coloured pencils for example 30 pencils, five of each colour. Give out randomly and watch the pupils group together.

• Recycle greetings cards/magazine pictures. Rip or cut old greetings card into the required number of group members, shuffle and distribute amongst the pupils, for example five cards cut into sixth pieces will create five groups with six pupils in each group. The same activity can be used with posters/photographs for famous people/teams/bands etc.

• Month of birth. Simply ask all pupils born in January to step forward. Continue through the months until you have enough pupils for you first group. Of course, this will only be effective once within a set class of pupils while the other methods will give you genuinely random groups no matter how many times you use the idea.

Once you have assigned your groups, you may want to assign captains/team leaders. Put a new spin on nominating and only allow pupils to nominate another pupil for the role; they cannot put their own name forward. Discuss with the pupils what qualities they are looking for in their leader. This always ends up as a really positive activity. I am often surprised with who the pupils pick.

Sally Way

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 4:10 pm and is filed under On the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.