I hope you have your copy of Math Work Stations and
are ready to get the book talk going!
Chapter 1 was a bit of an eye opener for me. Our team
plans mostly from Investigations and it is great, but isn’t set up to have
stations. The way I’ve been doing it, my students play a game for a time or two then
we move on. I really want to do a mix of Work Stations and Guided Math next
year, though. I think the work stations part will be great! My goal for next year is to be better
about differentiating my stations and letting my STUDENTS choose what they want
to keep and what to move on. I am all about choice, and can’t believe I let it
slip by me this time!
Now, on to Chapter 2… organization! This I can do! You may
have seen my post in March about Math organization already, but here it is
again in case you would like to see it. Click here!
I haven’t been teaching for too long, so I haven’t had to purge
many things that I don’t need.
I organize my math manipulatives like this:
I will be changing the way the unifix cubes are organized. I
really like the idea of having them in rows of 10 🙂
Here is a freebie for you! Below you can get your copy of
the labels I use to organize the manipulatives.
The materials we use often for games are stored like this:
This will probably end up being my math corner.
Most everything else I use for math is stored in this
container:
It has worked well for me so far, but I imagine as I get
more materials for different topics, I will be buying bigger containers to
stack in my cabinet oh so neatly!
This is the issue I have to tackle this summer… storing the math
games we are using. I have a vision of having good sized containers under the
place my students store their backpacks because that is typically wasted space
in my classroom. I am not sure how well this will work for me, though. When I
do figure out my storage solution for the stations we are using, I’ll let you
know. This year I felt like I was wasting quite a bit of time putting games away then getting
them out again the next day. I just don’t have a great way to store these yet.
Any ideas?
One more thought to ponder… I will be teaching math to 2
different classes. Yes, you read that right! For one hour a day I will be teaching math to another teacher’s class. She will teach science and social studies
to both of our classes, and I will teach math. Our school has a Dual Language program
that switches this way. It has worked out very well for them, and us monolingual teachers would like to do it as well. The issue I see is the choice
factor. (Remember Debbie Diller suggests to get the students involved in choosing how long to keep stations and when to put them away.) How likely is it that both classes will choose to have the same math
stations available? Any insight here?
For more, hop on over to Deedee Will’s blog to read what she
and other bloggers had to say!
