Scoot On Over!

After teaching for 20 or so years (good grief….It simply can’t be!), I have found it can be easy to get stuck in a rut and keep doing the same activities and lessons over and over.  I knew a teacher like this long ago.  She seemed old and tired.  Every day in her classroom was exactly the same.  You could predict how her lessons would go as easily as predicting that it will snow in Alaska sometime during the month of January.  Yes, indeed….it was dull, boring, monotonous, unvaried, lackluster, mundane, uninspiring….you get the picture.

Anchor charts and task card sets have both been welcome changes in my classroom.  Anchor charts I will save for another entry here, but I do have a few pictures from a previous post that kind of give you the idea.

4 Task Cards from my set of Graphing Points on a Coordinate Plane

For a FREE sample sheet of these task cards, click here.  

Task card sets are just what they sound like: a set of cards with topic-centered tasks printed on them.  I decided to have a go at it and created 3 sets for starters.  I also included posters with examples of the topic and corresponding Common Core Standards and “I Can” Statement Posters for reference.  The posters are perfect for pasting into student math journals for their own reference—all I had to do was reduce their size and copy.

Poster with Example of How to Graph Points on a Coordinate Plane

My “I Can” Poster for Students’ Math Journals

1.  I placed a different numbered task card on each student’s desk.  Each student also was given his or her own answer sheet on which to record the answers.  We only had 13 students in this particular group, so I only used the first 13 cards from the set.  (There are 28 on-level cards and 4 challenge cards total.)

2.  Directions for “How to Play Scoot” were posted on the Smartboard.  We read, discussed, and clarified the game rules as a class, since it was a completely new game for all of us.