SIMPLE TIP TO SAVE INK WHEN PRINTING TASK CARDS

Save ink and engage students with this quick tip for printing task cards!  I’m sharing a super easy low-ink trick to shake up your task cards and have fun.

Do you use task cards with your students?  I purchase a lot of various sets on Teachers Pay Teachers {like the and I also make many to go with my iPad activities so I can set up a tech center for students to practice various skills.

Printing task cards uses a lot of ink

Anyway, I was prepping a set of my fall themed digital book poster task cards take a picture of to show how the activity works, when my ink warning popped up.

I really wanted to print & snap them while my kids were still at the park with their daddy (who else tries to get the world done in 2 hours while their kids are occupied?!?!), but I didn’t want to have half of them print well and the other half streaky and gross.  So I remembered this tip I read for printing task cards smaller to save ink when photographing them.

 

Printing Task Cards Smaller

Since my task cards (and most I have purchased) are saved as a .pdf file, I changed the settings in the Adobe print menu to print multiple pages to a single page and ended up with this single page of baby task cards.

Since these task cards are vertical, I set up the printing options with Custom 2×2 and the Page Order as Horizontal.  You can play around with the Custom setting (try 2×1 for example for half page) and the Page Order until they are set how you want.  I print a lot of things half sized already to save ink so I really recommend trying some things out if you haven’t before.

Cutting the babies was quick and easy.  And I could not stopping admiring how cute they were.  Seriously, look at the stack of 12 (next to a pen for reference).

Using Smaller Task Cards in the Classroom

Then it hit me – if I was staring at their cuteness, then I knew my students would probably love them too.  Even better, I could add magnifying glasses to the center to make it even more fun!

If you decide to print some baby task cards keep in mind it works best with less text-heavy task cards and also be aware of any students with visual needs before going this route.  I would not do this for all sets, but as a change of pace.

Here is the affiliate link to the set of 10 magnifying glasses I purchased on Amazon (read my disclosure here):

So long story short…you read posts about how learning occurs during cognitive dissonance and making lemons out of lemonade and how challenges lead to innovation…well low printing ink totally lead to baby task cards – a new class favorite and fun way to shake up a learning center (while saving ink!).