Colorful Math Anchor Charts

Every year, teachers at our school are asked to create a Student Learning Goal - as part of the state teacher evaluation system. Our team's goal this year is to tackle students' abilities in written expression. Students in our school are mostly scoring 0s and 1s on Open Response questions on MCAS and ANet, the two major summative assessments used at our school.

Our team devised a set of action steps to attempt to handle the major task of bringing those scores up!! We know we can do it!! The math coach at our school gave me this awesome 4-Step Method for completing math open response questions. The problem is, it is VERY language heavy and most of my students are ELLs. I wanted to find a way to condense the language.....Sooooo since it was Friday night and my 3 men (husband and two little boys) were soundly asleep, I put on an old episode of Glee on Netflix and got to work creating an anchor chart to hang at the front of the room where all the kids can refer to it. (yes, I know the #2 footprint or "step" is larger than the others - not done on purpose!)

This is how it looks on my living room rug. Hopefully it will look better laminated, hanging on the wall under my whiteboard.

After correcting a batch of open response questions the students worked on in class, I noted that they didn't understand the differences between Strategies, Operations and Methods. We might use those words inter-changebly at times, but in math they have very different meanings.

As I was doing a mini-lesson, my co-teacher was jotting some things down on the whiteboard. When I turned around he had created 3 webs to visually display the differences and how they each connect to one another. So I took that information home and created another anchor chart for students who need visual reminders of the differences.

I love how these anchor charts add such color to my classroom. Just because I teach middle school doesn't mean my classroom can't be bright, cheery and colorful, right?!? Happy teaching!!