Are you looking for an easier way to keep your early finishers engaged and ensure the support of all students? With the right tools, you can create a comfortable learning space tailored to the needs of every student in your class.
Luckily, several add-ons are available that enhance my early finisher system and provide unique educational experiences to everyone involved. In this post, I’ll discuss how implementing these easy-to-use resources can help teachers stay organized and use these task cards all day long in the classroom!
Benefits of the Early Finishers System
A great way for teachers to save time and increase student assessment effectiveness is to use an early finisher task card system. This system allows teachers to easily provide activities to students who finish their work early.
Furthermore, it helps students practice skills they have already learned independently! The whole system is designed for students to use independently, helping free up teacher time.
While your students are engaged with the early finishers task cards system, you have extra time to work with students who need the most assistance. Work with small groups or individual students, all while knowing the rest of your class is practicing and perfecting skills you’ve taught them.
If you want to learn more about the system and how I set it up in my classroom, check out the following posts:
- Early Finishers Task Cards – Setting Up for Success
- 5 Reasons Why You Need an Early Finisher System
- How to Introduce Early Finisher Task Cards
- How to Use Task Cards in Centers
Early Finishers Answer Keys
Having an answer key for each activity can be a great way to help students assess their own understanding of a given task. Not only does it allow them to practice self-assessment and make the most of their time, but it also helps streamline the teacher’s workflow.
By having an answer key readily available, teachers no longer need to reassess each student individually and can instead easily check if they have answered correctly in much less time. Ultimately, providing an answer key with each activity is a great way to ensure students are utilizing their time correctly while not taking up more of the teacher’s valuable time.
Using answer keys with the task cards is completely optional. One of the main reasons I didn’t initially include them in the resource was that I was worried students would look at them first or worry too much about the right answer instead of just focusing on the practice of a skill.
I’ve had many teachers reach out to me and request answer keys because they saw a need in their classrooms (especially when using the task cards in centers).
If you use the answer keys, laminate them and either have them openly available to students or have them request them from you once they are done with all the task cards in that box. It’s totally up to you and what works best for your class!
I’ve included answer keys for activities in the kindergarten to 2nd-grade resources, but I left them out of the pre-K line because they didn’t seem developmentally appropriate for that age, and the activities are much more hands-on for that grade.
Early Finishers Skills Overview
Have you ever felt overwhelmed with finding the right activity for your early finishers? Looking through the endless list of activities can take more time than desired. Now, by adding a skills overview document to my early finisher system, teachers can quickly find an appropriate activity without wasting precious time.
Searching for a particular skill or standard has never been easier! The skills overview document helps teachers easily identify and access activities that match their chosen criteria, saving them time and stress. Whether you are searching for activities based on grade-level standards or individual student needs, the early finisher system offers quick and easy access to activities that will engage your students and challenge them to think critically.
I’ve had many teachers reach out and tell me that they have purchased multiple grade levels of the early finishers task cards to provide differentiation for their students.
Task cards are perfect for differentiation because students cannot tell if a group is working on an activity from the Pre-K set or the 1st-grade set!
Owning many task cards can be organizationally tricky when looking for the perfect activity to match your student’s needs. With this free overview tool, you can easily find the necessary activity by searching for a particular Common Core standard or skill. Grab your free early finishers skill overview at the link below:
Early Finishers Task Cards Skills Overview
Early Finishers Worksheet Packets
Enhancing the utility of early finisher task cards, companion worksheets provide a versatile and effective extension to keep students engaged and learning. These worksheets are designed to seamlessly align with the task cards, offering a deeper exploration of the concepts at hand.
Teachers can distribute these worksheets as part of a comprehensive early finisher packet for individual desk work, assign them as homework to reinforce classroom learning or incorporate them into small group activities for collaborative exploration.
These companion worksheets are also perfect for whole-class instruction, making them an excellent resource for substitutes who need ready-to-go materials.
When integrated into learning centers alongside task cards, they create a more robust educational station with built-in assessment opportunities that allow teachers to monitor and evaluate student progress effectively. This flexibility ensures that companion worksheets keep early finishers productively engaged and enhance the overall learning experience.
- Kindergarten Early Finisher Worksheet Packets
- 1st Grade Early Finisher Worksheet Packets
- 2nd Grade Early Finisher Worksheet Packets
Benefits of These Early Finishers Add-Ons
With the addition of the answer keys, teachers can transition from an early finishers activity to a quick assessment of student’s skills. Answer keys also make it easier to add early finishers task cards into centers where students can evaluate their progress at the end of the activity.
The skills overview allows teachers to quickly find what they are looking for to add in task cards to their small groups and centers or for parent volunteers to help individual students practice the exact skill they need assistance with.
If you already own the task cards, go back and re-download each month to find the answer keys! Download these handy new tools today and start seeing the benefits for your classroom tomorrow.
