Math Charts & Bulletin Boards
I love looking at other teachers' charts; I get so many ideas for my own classroom! When I visit other teachers' classrooms, I'm always trying to jot down great ideas for charts. Here are a couple of my math charts ...
Fact Family Houses with Fact Triangle Roofs
Our 'Rounding Chant' that I made up. The students love to chant this in a call and response.
Students cut out and sort number stories by operation.
At the beginning of the year, the students decorate paper cupcakes and we graph their birthdays. This also serves as a helpful reference throughout the year. I introduce data and graphing vocabulary like axes, key, maximum, and minimum.
My students fill in the info about faces/vertices/edges together after they explore geometric solid manipulatives in groups. Students have corresponding charts that they fill out as they pass the solids around. Within small groups they count the faces, vertices, and edges. Then they list real world examples of each solid. I've included my geometric solid investigation worksheet for download in the worksheet section.
Squares are so cool ... they get into every club! I explain to my students that squares are in the parallelogram club, the rhombus club and the rectangle club. This really helps the kids understand some complicated geometric nomenclature.
Quadrangles are a bit tricky with their many 'progeny.' This chart helps explain some of the sets and subsets. The children like to think of it as a family tree.
As part of our geometry unit, the students work in pairs to create geometric solid mobiles. They build their geometric solids from paper nets that they cut, fold, and glue. We attach the nets to wire coat hangers with yarn.
Our geometric solid mobiles hang in the window.
Our group projects for the 100th day of school hang in the hallway. It was quite a challenge to brainstorm 100 places the students would like to visit. 100 questions about the world came comparatively easily. The students explored exponents for the first time while they came up with 100 mathematical ways to make a hundred. Several students enjoyed brainstorming 100 acts of kindness.
Our Pizza Fractions bulletin board. Under each pizza is a paragraph written by the student explaining the fractional distribution of pizza toppings.
