Friday night. A student has a project due Monday, three days of homework somewhere in the backpack, and no idea which one to touch first. That is not a motivation problem. It is a planning problem - and planning is the one skill nobody teaches, because it happens inside someone else's head where you cannot see it go wrong.

These 24 task cards put the plan on paper where you can read it. Every card is one ordinary Tuesday problem - the 45 minutes that have to cover two things, the permission slip due at 8:00, the group project where one person did nothing - followed by one ask: write the plan you would actually hand in. Not "I'll try harder." A time, a place, a first physical action, and something to check it against.

Four ways to run it, all written out in the pack: scoot (one card taped to each desk, 90 seconds, rotate on the bell), small group (one card each, then the group picks the strongest plan and says why), early finishers (cards live in a jar with the response sheet), and 1:1 conference (two or three cards, you say nothing for the first four minutes and then listen). One card takes 2-4 minutes to talk through; twelve cards make a 40-minute lesson with the sort mat at the end.

What is in the download

• 24 scenario cards, four to a page, with ruled space to write the plan on the card itself - the plan lives beside the problem, not on a worksheet two folders away.

• Priority sort mat - Must / Should / Could, with eight cut-out items (phone charger, permission slip due at 8:00, the coat when it is 3 degrees outside) and one line underneath: the one thing you moved out of MUST today, and why.

• Planning log - task, your guess, what it actually took, where you got stuck, next time. The two middle columns are the whole point: a student's own estimate against the truth.

• Response sheet for running the cards as scoot or centres without collecting 24 cards.

• Facilitator notes - one line per card naming what you are listening for, so you are not guessing at the tell ("a plan with a Wednesday that is not 100% full", "risk: the title slide is the easy part, the group should decide the content split first").

• 28-slide deck (.pptx) - every card as a full slide, plus the sort mat and the four ways to run it. Upload it to your Drive and open with Google Slides, or run it straight from PowerPoint. Every element is a text box, so you can drop in your own students' names and deadlines.

• Print pack in both Letter and A4 (11 pages) and a README with the printing and rotation notes.

The differentiation is inside the cards, not bolted on. Cards 1-12 are concrete and daily; 13-24 ask for a judgement call with no clean answer. A reluctant writer can dictate the plan into a phone memo and still be doing the same thinking. The same card works as a two-minute bell ringer or a ten-minute conference.

Who buys this: grade 5-9 teachers running advisory and homeroom, resource-room and study-skills teachers, speech and OT sessions that need a structured topic with a visible outcome, counsellors working on the backpack problem, and parents who are tired of being the planner.

Nothing needs a student login, a subscription, a device or district permission. Print it the night before and it works.

Also from this shop: Phishing Lab, Privacy Lab, Password Lab and Spooky Inbox (the playable scam simulations with a free tracker), and the winter discussion pack for digital citizenship.

License: one classroom, unlimited students and unlimited years. Answers and cards may be photocopied for your students; please do not upload the pack to a public site or resell it.