Friday Freebie!!!

I am linking up with TBA today to bring you a FRIDAY FREEBIE! YAY!! We have been learning about nouns this week. I made these posters that you can get here on my TPT store.
I used the posters that I made to introduce nouns. Here is what they look like:

Then I placed posters around the room with the same heading. I put the students into groups and had them carousel around the room and list as many nouns as they could thing of. Each group had 2 minutes at each poster. I had each group use a different marker. My groups worked out so that a different student got to be the "writer" at each poster. The students had a lot of fun brainstorming together and making the posters.

Next week we are going to be learning about proper nouns. I am going to have the students use post-it notes and write proper nouns for each poster. We will place these around the existing posters. Enjoy the weekend!

Math Focus Board

I have really wanted to create bulletin boards this year that were educational and could be used as a reference daily for my students. I created Math and Reading Focus boards this summer, but when school started, and we started using them, they really didn't work for me like I wanted them too. Here are my original boards:

The Reading board worked okay for a little while, but I have remodeled it. I will post more about that one later. Today I wanted to post about the math board. It turned out, that this board did not work for me at all! I had to change the posters underneath the headings daily, which was a lot of work! I tried laminating construction paper and writing on it, but it got really messy.

I searched every blog I could find for a new Math Focus board. I found this one at Life in First:

I did my best to recreate this one... and just while typing this I noticed that I forgot to take a picture!!!
My board has the Math Talk section- this is where I write about the math vocabulary for the topic we are on. I also use the "Today's Problem" poster. Our Math series has a "Question of the Day." I use this section to post the question. Students answer on a post-it and stick it on the poster. With Common Core, we are really focusing on Higher Order questioning and writing in math. I use the essential question poster to post our question for each topic. Students also answer these on post-its. My students LOVE using their post-it notes! I did not use posters for months or days of the week. I use this space instead to post posters or other pictures or cut- outs that go along with our Topic. This week we are on Topic 5: Counting Money, I have put pictures of each of the coins on the board. I really wish I had remembered to take a picture of my board!! I love the way it turned out!

If you are an Envision Math user, you may be interested in the Essential Question Posters I have created for my focus board. You can get them at my TPT store by clicking HERE. The first pack includes an essential question for every lesson in Topics 1-10.