The Partners Nightmare...Solved

Me: "You're going to be working with a partner..."
Students: "I can't work with him..."  "No one wants to be my partner..."  "Can we have a group of three?" "You chose the groups? That's not fair."

It happens to me all the time and by the end of the year it drives me NUTS. I spent a ridiculous amount of time on Pinterest looking for different solutions to my problem. We all know the popsicle stick system of drawing out names from a cup and pairing up the students. Problem: This works well for a classroom teacher, but not so well for a specials teacher because I have over 200 students and I am not writing students names on 200 popsicle sticks (horribly time consuming and wasteful). One idea that a teacher friend shared with me was a partner wheel with half the students names on the outside and the other half on the outside, spin the wheel and it matches up partners.  So then I got to thinking about how I could adapt this to work for me (because I'm not making 15 different partner wheels for each class) and couldn't come up with an easy solution. So now I have partner cards!

I stole this idea from an awesome fellow music teacher Jackie (read her blog! Lots of healthy & yummy recipes! http://quarternotecafe.blogspot.com/), who stole it from her awesome co-teacher!

The system uses common pairings & duos from daily life, movies and tv (e.g. macaroni & cheese, Batman & Robin, Tom & Jerry, etc.) that can also be used as a way to put students in groups of four using common themes (e.g. Disney Group: Lilo & Stitch and Nemo & Dory).

Here are the cards for the "Muppet" group of four, the partners are Kermit & Miss Piggy and Bert & Ernie!

When getting students into partners or groups of 4, pass out a card to each student in a random order. Then it is the students' job to find their match/group and there is no complaining about groups because it is 100% up to chance.   You can also use this idea to keep track of what groups are doing what in terms of projects/ activities, etc. Or an easy way to randomly choose students/pairings to share with the class (after students get into their groups turn in their cards and pick then randomly from the deck). I would laminate all the cards before using them to make sure they last (and because I love the laminator!) and the "cheat sheet" (for both you and the students). You can find both items as PDFs below!


Partner Cards  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2lupteVxMifNU1Rb19FdDFMams/edit?usp=sharing

Partner "Cheat Sheet"  https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2lupteVxMifTzl0RFVVSTdaUFE/edit?usp=sharing

P.S. Sometimes I have classes of 30 students, so I expanded the Disney grouping with a third pair, making a group of 6!