How To: Open & Closed Sorts

• Lesson Objective: Recognize and classify graphemes and vocabulary to build connections, fluency and accuracy

• Methodology: Students sort and classify targeted graphemes or vocabulary

• Duration: 5-10 minutes

  
  

🖍 How the Routine Works

I use open and closed sorts for both phonology and morphology. On the first day of a new phonological unit, students classify all the target graphemes. It's an "open" sort, meaning that student may group the graphemes however they wish as long as they can justify their thinking. Typically, they focus on the letters as that may be all that is recognizable. For example, in our long vowel team unit, many students chose to group all the graphemes that began with <a>, <e>, <i> <o> and <u> despite the fact that they did not all produce those particular long vowel sounds. If time allows, I ask students to classify their graphemes in a different way. I may share how another student sorted. I may have them work in pairs. Below are two examples of open sorts for long vowel teams.

The open sort has many benefits.  I often ask students to read each grapheme to me. I'm able to assess background knowledge in this way. It helps build confidence since there's no "wrong" way to sort, gives me insight into their prior knowledge, encourages connection-making, and familiarizes students with spelling patterns.

After students have had several days of immersion in the new phonological concept, I redistribute their baggies of graphemes and they perform a closed sort. This time, I want them to sort by phonemes. Continuing with the long vowel team example, I asked students to sort by long each long vowel sound. I would first request that they sort without any support to see how much they've retained. Then, I'd allow them to check their sort against a resource and make corrections.

Example "closed" sort in which explicit classification instructions were given.

For our morphology units, we'll typically classify our terms and definitions towards the end of the unit. Round 1 is an open sort. Often students go ahead and match the terms with the definitions. Terms are typed in bold font for easy identification. For additional rounds, I ask students to sort in a different way. Some possible prompts include:

• Do you see any words with similar meanings?

• Do any words have the same morpheme (prefix/suffix/base)?

• Can you sort by parts of speech (things, action, describing words)?

• Sort the words by emotions. Do you associate joy, anger, or worry with any of the terms?

Check out the Interactive Unit Guides to see how this lesson fits within each unit. There, you’ll find links to the unit-specific Open & Closed Sorts.