Morning Message

Before

Here is a quick explanation of how I do morning message each day.  It's the second page of my calendar math flipchart.  Every morning I write the students a message with information about the day or I let the "star student" of the day help me think of something that the class needs to remember!  This was our message on Tuesday.  I chose this one because we're focusing on graphs in math, and I knew it would be perfect to lead up to the graphing activity that I had planned.  We read the message all together, the students turn to their "thinking buddy" to talk about things that can be corrected, and then students come to the board to make corrections (unless we're running behind on time or have an extremely busy day ahead of us-I make the corrections as students tell me what to fix).

Sometimes the message is a list of things that we have to do that day.  Sometimes it's a letter, and sometimes it has a "math twist" like a graphing, counting, or problem solving activity embedded within it.  It's really quick to change every day since all I have to do is clear the old message and type in the new message or activity.  

After

(I made the corrections today-we had our weekly trip to the library right after calendar math time.)

This is a little chart that we've been working on since Monday.  It's incomplete right now because we're adding information that we learn each day.  When we finish there will be examples of each type of graph/chart hanging around the chart so that students also have a visual representation.  Most of the time I chart information on the Promethean Board, but if there's a chart that I want to hang around the room for future reference, I still break out the handy dandy chart paper and Crayola markers.

This is the activity that we completed today.  There was almost an argument about whether or not I "needed" to have a girl since I already have two boys.  Of course the boys were quite certain that having a girl in your family is not a necessity at all!

This was the independent practice activity for the day.  We read and "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and thought of all of the fruit that he ate while he was growing and changing.  Then we graphed our favorite fruits.

 Each student created their own graph.

 The last part of the activity was discussion and data analysis where the students answered questions about the graph.