For anyone who doesn't know me, I love using anchor charts in my classroom to teach my kids. I find that they are a great way to reach kids on different levels with different learning styles. While I'm creating the chart(s), my students come to the carpet and write the information down in their journals. I usually create my anchor charts when I'm introducing a new concept to the kids or reviewing/reteaching something. As I'm talking to the kids, I ask them how they want me to write what I'm saying. This not only gives the kids ownership over what we're learning, but it also helps keep it in "kid friendly" terms. I always use lots of color on my anchor charts as well. Each different sentence/statement gets its own color. For example, a chart over main idea might look like this:
Main Idea/Supporting Details
- main idea is what a story is mostly about or what the author wants you to remember
- supporting details are the things that support they main idea
- supporting details usually answer the questions who, what, when, where, why, how
This was a math activity that I did one year during Thanksgiving. We were studying the relationship between multiplication and division so we made fact family turkey's. Student got a piece of manila paper and traced their hand. Where the palm is, they wrote a self selected number and on each of the fingers they wrote the fact families related to that number. In order to prevent students from having the same fact turkey, they had to write their name and number on the white board one table at a time. If someone "took" the number someone else was planning on using, one of them would have to select a different number. The thumb was used to draw the face. To make the legs, I took brown and orange pipe cleaners and cut them in half. For the feet/toes I would use a quarter of a pipe cleaner and just wrap it around the leg making 3 "toes". The kids loved making these and they were a great activity to do for the holidays. I titled the bulletin board, "Ms. Andersen's Class Gobbles Up Division"
In 4th grade, our focus is Texas History and I'm always trying to come up with activities for the kids to do that are more hands on and less pencil and paper. One of the first things we teach each year are the regions of Texas. I put the students in groups and had them research different things about their region; plants, animals, major cities, land, climate, etc. I then gave them magazines (TX Monthly) and had them find pictures of things they would find in their region. Each group then received a poster sized version of their region to record their information on and present to the class. After each group presented, we put the regions together to show how they make Texas.
To make the regions poster size, I just took a map of the regions and put one region each on a piece of copy paper. I then enlarged each region on the copy machine and then used our poster machine to make it poster sized. I cut out each region and then the kids did the rest of the work.
4th grade in Texas, is all about writing and personal narratives. As a beginning of the year project, I had the kids create bio-poems. We went through the process together as a class and then to pubish them, the kids made themselves using construction paper. On the body/shirt is where they wrote their poem, they then created pants, and the rest of their person. They had so much fun doing these and it was a great way to get to know each other.
While studying states of matter, we went to the computer lab and created 3-column charts using Kid Pix. Each student had to find at least 2 images to put in each colum and then name/explain why they put that item in that category.
This final pictuer is one of my classroom library. It's probably really hard to see, but I have tons of books. I'll explain how I have them organized later, but I wanted to show this picture. It also shows more of my anchor charts, I told you, I love to teach with anchor charts. Each year, the walls of my classroom are covered with different anchor charts. You also see the windsocks we created when we were learning about wind. Each student wrote 4 or 5 facts that they learned about wind on a half sheet of construction paper. I used a 12x18 piece of paper cut in half lengthwise. To make the streamers, I cut tissue paper into 1 inch strips using the paper cutter. The kids glued the streamers along the bottom of their windsocks. To make the hanger, we punched 2 holes in the top of the paper and used a pipe cleaner to create the hanger handle. You could also use yarn if you didn't have pipe cleaners.
