Function vs Not a Function Card Sort Activity
This function vs not a function card sort activity is the perfect way to assess whether or not students can apply the definition of a function to determine whether a relation is or is not a function.
This card sort activity provides students practice classifying graphs, tables (both horizontal and vertical tables), ordered pairs, and mapping diagrams as either a function or not a function.
My old card sort for this was stolen from Kim Hughey and resized on the copy machine, so I didn’t have a digital copy. Last week, I decided to create a new one instead of trying to track down my paper copy of the old one I had been using.
Some years, I had students do the card sort over two separate pages so they could write a justification sentence next to each card.
Here’s what I came up with for my new function vs not a function card sort:
I tried to include as many different relations as possible in as organized a way as possible to reduce cutting time. Students don’t have to think about how to cut around each relation. They just have to cut on the dotted lines.
And, as a bonus, you only need to print one sheet per three students!
I decided to print them on blue paper.
Some of my students did their sorting in their notebooks.
Others did their sorting on their desk then glued the results in their notebooks afterwards.
Either way, I did enforce that my students get their sorting checked BEFORE gluing them in their notebooks!
Digital Version of Function vs Not a Function Card Sort
I created a Desmos version of this card sort to make things easier for those of us doing distance learning/hybrid learning.
Free Download of Function or Not a Function Card Sort Activity
Function vs Not a Function Card Sort (PDF) (8044 downloads )
Function vs Not a Function Card Sort (Editable Publisher File ZIP) (2737 downloads )
Awesome! Can't wait to do this with my kiddos!!
Perfect, thank you. Just started functions today 🙂
It never fails that right after I complete a topic, you post something new for it 😉 haha….next year!
~Elizabeth
I was looking at the OpenMiddle problem you have on creating 3 functions and 3 non-functions. It looks like they cut out the numbers to fill them in for the chart, but how many sets of numbers do they need? Is it 6? It looks like an awesome activity, but I'm looking for more explanation on it please.
Thank you so much for all of your resources. Here is the card sort broken into sections on Desmos (my kids need to take it slow…) https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/5a728cf7ac00fb3c93b23a4a
This is awesome idea, will try with my kids too. Thanks.
Thanks for this. Looks great!
Thank you so much for all of your amazing resources. Id be lost without you!
This was so helpful for my small group math lessons. Thank you so much!!