What Doesn't Belong Worksheets
This may seem like a skill that does not hold much weight towards students future, but quite on the contrary, being able to delineate things with in a group is a huge leap forward toward being able to breakdown things within a group and ultimately be able to sift through and sort things. In many situations students will be given many choices and this is their first step in understanding which choice may be the best from their possible selections. These worksheets and lessons help students understand which object might be odd in a set. Students will take their time to pick out those that do not match the others in a set.
Aligned Standard: K.MD.A.3
- What Sticks Out? Step-by-Step Lesson- Which of these stick out like a sore thumb?
- Guided Lesson - These shouldn't baffle kids at all. They are very straight forward.
- Guided Lesson Explanation - I found this very difficult to explain outside of the obvious.
- Practice Worksheet - There are four objects in each of these. This makes for a great sorting skill starter.
- Matching Worksheet - Match the odd man out. By adding matching choices, the choices really get pulled out.
- Answer Keys - These are for all the unlocked materials above.
- Animals What Doesn't Belong Lesson- There is an odd man out in this one. Or should I say odd pig out.
- Find the Different Worksheet - This are pretty simple for most students. Not as challenging as other sheets in this section.
- What Doesn't Belong Worksheet- I numbered or labeled everything so that it could serve as a class wide activity, if needed.
- Food Circle What Doesn't Belong Lesson - Fruit versus food stuffs is an abstract concept for some students.
- Grouping Like and Different Lesson- Would you believe that the whale comes up often because of it's size?
- What Doesn't Belongs Independent Practice Worksheet- It might be easy to spot that I put this one together on an Easter weekend.
- Objects What Doesn't Belong Lesson- We get some more work in on plotting data charts and the comparing items.
- Find The Odd Lesson- The panda kind of sticks out like a sore thumb or a needle in a really, really small hay stack.
- What Doesn't Belongs Practice Worksheet- The last one trips up a lot of students because they never knew that cartoon animals walk on two legs.
How to Determine What Does Not Belong in a Group
Guessing something that is present in a set or a group but doesn't belong there is an important skill to learn. It enhances the analytical ability of a brain and proves to be useful in many situations. These types of questions are often asked in employment and aptitude tests because they test your analytical thinking ability. They are comparatively simple to solve. However, a few of them, at an advanced level, can be a bit tricky.
You often need to evaluate things that you may not be observant about to do this well. It is helpful to begin by asking yourself what things are unique to one of these objects. There is a simple trick that can help you in solving such questions. You just have to pick that one thing that doesn't blend with others of the set. For example, in the case of four shapes, three can be four-sided while the fourth one can have only three sides. All are shapes, but the catch here is the number of sides each shape has. While all the shapes have four sides, there is one that has three sides, hence the odd one. So, it doesn't belong to the group and should be picked as the answer.
As we explored in the previous example, shapes are a great place to start with this technique it helps students begin to identify unique traits of geometric shapes with understanding their names or things like corners, angles, or sides is tremendously beneficial for students. When they begin to learn this geometry-based vocabulary, they will be rock stars for certain.
There can be other cases as well in which it can become tricky to guess what doesn't belong to a group, but all such questions revolve around a basic technique. Learning and mastering that can help anyone solve any such questions. I would begin by having students learn to sort things based on one trait, if we can get that to two traits by the end of the year, they will have made a huge leap forward. Sorting is great, this is where the students determine the traits they feel differ between the objects, but categorizing is where it is at. This is where they are provided the different characteristics needed to break a group into categories. This is a different technique to approach this skill from. We would encourage you to work on both skills with your students.