Anchor Chart Preview and Math Strategies

This week I decided to created my reading anchor charts before hand. This will save me some class time. Here they are:

We have been discussing putting in full effort. I saw this chart on pinterest and think it is a good way for my scholars to rate the amount of effort they are putting forth.

This was another pinterest find. We have been talking a lot about working in groups and learning from our classmates. Scholars will be able to refer to this chart from now on. They will also be able to evaluate how well they did based off of the chart.

We will then decide what a group discussion should look and sound in our classroom and complete this chart.

The last two weeks we have been monitoring our thinking while reading and writing down what we are thinking, so this week I will introduce the word schema as a word that people in college use. My scholars will get a kick out of that.

Our comprehension skills this week are making inferences and point of view. Here are the two anchor charts that I will use for them.

Finally, here are 4 sentence starters that I will introduce to my scholars this week. I have a bulletin board dedicated to sentence starters. These will be added to the board.

I have never premade anchor charts before. I usually make them in front of the class, but they usually end up being a little sloppy and it takes more time. I will see how thus works out. I do like the fact that I was able to plan the chart out and I didn't have 21 pairs of eyes watching me as I made them.

What anchor charts are you using on your classroom this week?

Below are the different multiplication and division strategies I teach. So far we have learned unmarked array and bowtie, a way of decomposing numbers. I still need to teach partial product, which I will teach tomorrow. Now that we have multiple strategies, I require my students to use at least 2. The second way is to check their work.

For division, I teach chunking, multiple towers, and clusters. Once we learn all the strategies, they can use the one they are most comfortable, but they must then check their work using multiplication.

I teach these multiplication and division strategies because they help students see the parts of numbers and are therefore able to explain how and why the strategy works. This is exactly why I don't teach the traditional methods for multiplication and division. They don't show the place value in the numbers and therefore students aren't able to explain the math behind them.

How do you teach multiplication and division in your classroom?

Inner Conversations

Last week, our reading strategy was following your inner conversation by leaving tracks. We discussed the importance of thinking about their reading and then writing those thoughts down (leaving tracks). Leaving tracks during reading was compared to animals leaving tracks in the snow. Even though the animal may be gone, you can tell what animal was there by looking at the tracks. In reading, we write notes to track our thinking and after we are finished we can remember what we read by reading the notes. Therefore, we "leave tracks" of our thinking.

Throughout the week, we did read alouds, partner reading, and independent reading where the students practiced leaving tracks. On Friday, we did a culminating activity. I read the book Mufaro's Beautiful Daughters by John Steptoe. While I read, they left tracks of their thinking in their reading notebooks. After we finished, my scholars discussed the book in small groups. To work on conversational skills we use sentence starters. Our sentence starters for the week were I think, I believe, In my opinion, I wonder, I agree because, and I disagree because. (I love hearing children using these sentence starters.) After the discussions, my scholars created thought bubbles with their thoughts about the book. These were the track they wrote while I was reading the book. They then drew a self portrait and created a poster with the thought bubble coming from their self portrait. They turned out great!

Here are pictures of some of them.