There are lots of advantages to cutting a worksheet into lots of little cards, including that it can automatically make the activity look like more of a game and therefore more interesting, and that it makes many more games possible. However, there are also disadvantages to cutting up, including:
- the teacher and/ or students getting tired of having bits of paper in almost every class
- the students also needing a copy to take away and so the number of photocopies being increased
- such activities being difficult or impossible with online students
- students spreading germs if they handle the same set of cut up bits of paper
- wasting time cutting the worksheets up
The last of those is probably the main annoyance with worksheets which are designed to be cut up, especially in situations like pairwork activities in large classes, and photocopies which have to be thrown away if you cut slightly over the line. Therefore almost every teacher must have wondered if they can cut down on scissor use. There are also good pedagogical reasons for doing so, like students being able to make notes more easily if they have larger sheets to work with. This article therefore starts with tips on how to not use scissors so much, before looking at other ways to cut down on this part of prep time.
Cutting down on cutting up
Many materials which are designed to be cut up such as domino activities really have to be cut up or are at least no fun if they aren’t. Even these, however, might work or even be better with one or two lines of cards missed out, e.g. saving time by only cutting up the top eight rows of the ten rows of the table.
Other worksheets might not need to be cut up at all. For example, if the only reason for using a pack of cards is so that students can choose things at random, you can give them the whole worksheet and ask them to close their eyes and put their hand down on one of the cards, or you can put numbers on each part of the worksheet and ask them to choose random numbers. It is also sometimes possible to fold instead of cutting.
Other worksheets might work just as well if they are just cut into half, cut into quarters, or cut into columns rather than being cut into 20 individual cards. Alternatively, you can cut up fewer copies if you find that activities work at least as well in groups of three or four as in the pairs that the instructions say, or if one pack has so many cards that groups can take half a pack each.
Cutting up more quickly
When you need to or want to cut up a worksheet, the obvious technique for doing so faster is to put the copies for all the pairs or groups in your class on top of one another and cut through them all at once. However, if you end up cutting through one of the lower copies in the wrong place, you might sometimes have to waste more time in total due to having to start all over again. You may also get the cards from different sets mixed up. Tips to avoid such time-consuming mess-ups include:
- only cut two to four copies at a time
- photocopy each copy on different coloured paper, so the different sets are easy to distinguish
- cut the sheets into columns while they are all on top of each other, then put the columns of each pack on top of each other to be cut into individual cards that are already in packs
Alternatively, you can cut up scrap paper (which is much quicker as it doesn’t matter the shape you make or if you make too many) and get students to write the necessary words on them.
Someone else cutting up
The most obvious someone else to get cutting up is other teachers, for example by teachers all keeping and sharing sets of cards that others might want to use later.
If there are enough scissors, you might also be able to sometimes justify students cutting up their own packs of cards, as long as you tell them to look closely and try to memorise the cards that will shortly be hidden from them as they do so. For example, with pelmanism, students can put the cards down one by one face down as they cut them off the pack. If cutting up individual cards will take more time than they’d need to look at the cards for just to memorise them, they could be given worksheets which have been partially cut up into rows or columns and just finish off the cutting up with their own pairs of scissors.