Sorting and Matching Cards for NHA Order of Draw, Additives, and Inversions

Sorting cards are a great way to give your students a tactile opportunity to work with order of draw. On the first day I introduce order of draw, (I personally do it the second week of school) I give students the green chart on page 4. I tell them we will be learning and memorizing the information and will have a quiz on it Friday, where they fill in the same chart. A few students will take that info and begin memorizing it right away but most will need a lot of help to memorize this, and since order of draw, inversions, and additives are a large part of the NHA test, we HAVE to make sure our kiddos memorize this.

On the second day, I have sheets 5-6 printed out on cardstock. Students cut the squares out and practice repeatedly putting the tubes in the correct color for order of draw. Toward the end of class, I place 3 sets of the cards on a table and have students come up and “race” to get them in order the quickest. I provide kids with a small paper bag that they whole punch and leave in their binders to keep up with these cards.

The third day I have page 7 printed on card stock for each student and they cut these out and then match the additives to the colors. After its matched up I ask students to raise their hand an announce any connections that they see. Many will say things like “Yellow is the color of the sun and it goes with SPS which reminds me of SPF!” or “Sodium Chloride reminds me of the ocean and the ocean is light blue”. These connections seem random, but I found letting them make these connections is a really important step. I affirm the best ones and we go back and remind them of the connections they made frequently. After we make connections, I have them mess all the cards up and put them together again 3-4 times.

On the 4th day, we repeat everything from the day before but add in page 8, the number of inversions. I also ask them to make connections. Most students will announcements like “almost all of them are 8-10” Affirm good connections. Have students mess up the cards and put them in the correct order a few times.

On the 5th Day, I have them start by placing all their cards on their desk in the correct order, saying out loud any connections they remember. Then I give them the chart on page 9 as a quiz grade. We repeat this every Friday until all students have mastered it. On the last day I have them find a partner and play “match”. They flip all cards face down and take turn flipping one card over and looking for its match. The fun part is that they have the possibility to match multiple ways - Lavender can match with EDTA, it’s order in the draw (5), or its number of inversions (8-10). Matching game makes them know the information in more than one way.

I don’t usually print page 10 because printing and copying in color can be an issue, but I included it for anyone who has easy access to colored printing.

Happy Teaching My Friends!!!