organizing teams

I teach over 800 students every week, 30 minute classes, about 30 students per class.  I need efficient ways to divide my students into different size groups for different activities.  Sometimes I want like abilities together  and sometimes I like to mix skill levels.  Here are a couple ideas I use to divide classes up into teams:

1.  Play music and have the students just walk or dance around the room.  When the music stops they stand toe to toe with # (designate size of group by holding up number of fingers) of people.  I sometimes add restrictions such as wearing the same color, #boys#girls, etc.  Sometimes I repeat 2 or 3 times, telling them each time that they can’t have someone in their group who was in it the last round (good way to mix up friends)

2.  For outside, as the class arrives I give them a fitness task to complete.  As each child finishes I hand them a jersey to put on.  I have all my colors out and pre-counted so that as I hand them a jersey, I can mix up who is wearing what color.  Since my most athletic kids tend to finish the fitness task first, I can give each one a new color and have them evenly distributed.  Same idea with my slow students.  I end up with teams evenly divided and marked.  I sometimes have them do an activity with a partner wearing a different color jersey to keep them guessing!

These are my favorite and easiest team divisors.  How do you divide classes?