Thursday, October 6, 2011

Hooked on Anchor Charts

As we wrap up the eighth week of school, I feel like we have anchor charts coming out of our ears.  However, I can't imagine teaching without them!  Here are just a few of our charts that we've generated with our students!
In the beginning of the year, we created a lot of charts about what classroom procedures should "look like, sound like, and feel like." 
We used this great visual to help our students get a better understanding of the beginning, middle, and end of a story.  It was definitely Pinterest inspired!  
To help encourage recognition and mastery of our weekly vocabulary words (seen here), our students love to  write their found vocabulary words from their reading on this classroom chart.  Our kids are so excited when they find our vocab words in their books! 
After learning that good readers question 24/7, our kids generated this chart of "I Wonder" questions and "I Learned" responses after reading a book about tornadoes.
  This visual and acronym has been great to help kids remember author's purpose.  We will continue to build on this idea through out the year.
After introducing author's purpose, we created a PIE chart that we will continue to add to through the next month or so.  We also created an anchor chart showing the difference between common nouns and proper nouns.
While studying non-fiction text features, this anchor chart was used to show how to read labels.  Our students then labeled their own picture in their non-fiction text feature booklet.  (My picture is obviously Pinterest inspired!)
We've recently been studying pictographs and bar graphs in class.  Before the students completed their own graphs, we made some together.  The students also generated their own questions to go along with the graphs. 
After generating their own questions, our students worked with their shoulder partners (Kagan grouping) to answer their questions.  
It's amazing how involved kids become in their learning when they get their initials written next to their examples!  It's been a great way for them to take ownership in our whole group lessons.
Our list of wow words continue to grow as the year goes on!  Our kids love adding things to our anchor charts!