#Made4Math My Classroom

I have just started in a new school. I worked there for 3 weeks before the Summer holidays started. As you can imagine these few weeks were filled with learning new policies, procedures, learning new computer software, meeting new classes, meeting new staff and getting to know a whole new area.

This left little time for me to sort out my classroom. It was left in a bit of a guddle.

There were resources everywhere, piles of textbooks and I couldn’t find anything. I managed to clear some of it during June and started on the backing paper for the new displays. I didn’t even attempt to clear the cupboard (it made me very sad to see it in such a state).

I am hoping to go in next week to tidy the cupboard, put up my new displays and organise my resources.

Here is what I have made so far:

Questions that promote thinking

I came across this document awhile back on Twitter.

The link to this document is here. The poster has 100 questions for teachers to ask students to promote mathematical thinking and classroom discussion. I was really drawn to these and wanted a way to implement these in my classroom. Many of these questions I ask on a regular basis but felt that many of these questions would be very useful for my students to ask themselves as well. My problem was how to interpret these and display these in a helpful way.

Then yesterday I saw these on Twitter:

The problem with Time

One of my biggest frustrations as a teacher is when pupils make errors in calculations, not due to lack of understanding of the maths, but lack of knowledge about the basic facts of time.

If I had £1 for every time a pupil told me there are 48 weeks in a year, I would be pretty wealthy. Many don’t know how many days are in a year or even what a leap year is. Worst of all is not knowing how many days are in each month. I know all my pupils will have learned these all before but never remember them. Maybe in the day of electronic gadgets they don’t need to know these facts but it would be nice if they did.

To combat this, I have made these posters to display in my classroom.

Posters

It’s a new school year and I have a new classroom. I have been thinking about how to best decorate the classroom. I have a few posters from last session which I want to keep using but I wanted to add a few new ones.

The first one is my math-y name. This idea came from Sarah Carter’s Welcome sign. I decided to make my name to put on my door. Here it is: