Fraction Task Cards & Work Station Questions

I'm back and I'm ready to try something new! Thank you all for commenting and helping me out with trying to link a document to a picture. Hopefully it works! : ) Right before break we started working with fractions. Throughout January we plan to spend quite a bit of time on it as well. I made some task cards where students have to draw the shape and create however many equal parts listed and finish the fraction. We haven't done anything like this before so I'll be doing a lot of modeling so they will all be able to do it during work stations independently. Click here or on the picture to get the task cards.

I don't know how I got so lucky, but I don't have to go back to school until Wednesday AND it's a teacher workday (our 1st!!) so I'll only have kids 2 days next week. Maybe it was because we didn't have any type of Fall Break or days off that we got so lucky to have a full 17 days off. Now if only I can get as much work done as I had planned!

Something I'm really trying to focus on this year is workstations...for some reason I just can't figure out the rotation schedule no matter how hard I try. Does anyone else have this problem?? I end the day with post its marking which students were in which station and refer back to them throughout the week to make sure they don't repeat. It's crazy, I know there's got to be a better way! I have 22 students and they're in groups of 2 with a same ability partner. My questions to you are:

*how many students are in each group?

*how many total work stations or centers do you have?

*do all of your students visit every work station? I have some that are too complicated for my lowest students, so instead I have some more appropriate stations that only they go to.

*are your students grouped by ability level or do you have your students mixed up?

Whew, too many at once? : ) Any input you have would be appreciated. I've got a couple more days before I go back to hopefully figure this out once and for all!