Math Anchor Charts

My favorite subject to teach is math. I love sharing this with students and coming up with new ways to present information.

We make this poster in the first few weeks of school. Students have a math notebook and take notes during math. We don't usually open our math books until homework/classwork problems. With Common Core, so much emphasis is placed on word problems that students need to know the key words. While we write this at the beginning of the year before they have learned division, I still give them the key words so that they have them. I constantly refer to this chart and the students are able to recognize key words on their own. I also add to the chart if new key words come up that we don't have.

We also go over problem solving steps with word problems. I model this every time we do a word problem in class. The students love to highlight the facts and the question! They have also improved at being able to go through these steps on their own. I love the confidence they have when they can understand the problem and aren't intimidated by the words! 

I put this poster up when we were talking about metric units of measurement. It is still up, just not on my math wall as we are now talking about division. Below each unit, there is an example of something that would be measured in that unit. There are also the conversion numbers to use when converting. 

This isn't an anchor chart, but I wanted to share it because I was so happy with it! I was teaching my students to multiple by powers of 10, 100, and 1,000 and Engage NY had me show it using a place value chart. My students nicknamed this the "Magic Chart" because they loved it and understood the concept. I have been using so many place value charts this year to teach math and have been so impressed with how my students are able to understand the concepts more. I even taught division using a place value chart and it clicked with so many students why we regroup.

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Language Arts Anchor Charts

Anchor charts are a huge part of my classroom. I typically do not put any up until the second or third week of school because I want the students to work with me on writing them and see how we use them. 

The first charts I had my students make were grammar charts. I used to have these old parts of speech posters on my back wall, but they kept falling down and were quite dated. Instead of buying new ones or writing them myself, I split the students into groups. Each group had one large poster and one smaller poster. I gave them the part of speech and using their grammar and English books, they had to write a definition and an example. I did this at the beginning of the year and it was a great partner opportunity for my kids. I love how they turned out and the students are constantly looking at them and referring to them. 

I've been doing a lot of figurative language this year. The students were struggling in identifying the different types so we made a tree map. They then had to look through their books and find examples. We changed them out every week so they were constantly thinking of them. Now, they have a small notebook where as we read books in class, they keep track of all figurative language they hear.

We made this poster at the beginning of the year before we read our first vocabulary story. The students all have this in their notebooks. We talked about the steps of Close Reading and what we do when we read. They are good about referring to it when we start a new unit and have even started asking their own questions to focus on.

This is another poster that is up almost the entire year. Students also have this in their notebooks so they can refer to it on the wall or in their notebooks. They are also really good at using the correct symbols. It makes it so much easier for me when I am reading their writing because I can use these marks and they know exactly what it means.

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