Math Word Walls

No doubt, you've seen word walls for language literacy. What about mathematical literacy?  As part of my Capstone project for my diploma, I have began incorporating a math word wall into my room. I love it! I am so proud of my students and all of the words they are learning and using. It is fun to hear them talking during math and hear one students say to another, "You need to decompose that number first. It will make it easier to add." or "That is not a reasonable answer. Remember what Mrs. Teague said. It needs to be logical and that is way way way off!" 

How to get started: 

First, you will need to find yourself a set of word cards for the wall. these are not easy to find in stores, but luckily there are a few great downloadable ones out there. Which words you choose comes down to personal choice. What do you want your students to use the words for? How big do you want them? Do you want the definition on them? Here are some of my favourites: 

1. Broward free word wall- this is a smaller set of words but they have little pictures to help students remember what the word is- I like that!

2. 3 Word types- free- this is a neat set of words- they have the same word three times per 8.5 X 11 page. The first is just the word, the second has a word and little picture and the third has the word, picture and definition. 

3. Teachers Pay Teachers- using the search term math word wall there are many to choose from. 

4. Teaching and Tapas math word wall- this is the wall that I purchased above. It is colour coded for the main strands of math. it also includes the definition and a little picture beside each word. I liked these because they included the three items I wanted and also came in three sizes. I used the largest sized words for my wall but you can also print off smaller words for students to use at centers etc... 

5. Virginia DOE free word wall words per grade - I found these after I purchased mine and I love them! They are full page which is great for visibility in the room. They would take up more space but you could rotate words as needed. 

Now what? 

The next step is to prepare your words. I had mine printed at Staples. It cost just over $25 for my set of words. In retrospect, there are some words that I think I may never use and I could have saved some money by not printing them but then again, it is nice to have a full and complete set of words ready to go. Laminate them and you are ready to go. I keep mine separated by colour. this makes it easier to find the words suited to the strand we are learning at the time. 

Setting up your wall

There are LOTS of options here. Many who have used language word walls before may think of placing the words in alphabetical order. This is not needed for a Math word wall as it will contain a lot less words and they are grouped differently, similar to grouping a language wall by placing nouns together or colour words together.  Some people just put up the words for their present unit. So far, I have just added the words we have studied. I am not sure what I will do when our little bulletin area is full. What are your thoughts? 

Click here part 2- What to do with your wall? 

What's the Question?

What makes a good Math teacher? 

"Use group problem-solving to stimulate students to apply their mathematical thinking skills (Artzt & Armour-Thomas, 1992)"

Working on our problems

As part of our continued math Talk, we have been spending a lot of time on word problems. I think it is important to students to approach them from all angles. This includes looking at them backwards by writing the questions. I loved this resource called What's the question?  by Brandi Wayment from The Research based Classroom.  I am firm believer in saving time and if someone has already created a great resource, use it! You then free up more time to work on other projects for your students. This is a great resource. Basically, it is a large set of sheets like the above that give the answer.

Love her story for how the last bird showed up. 

We walked through a demo. of this very problem as a class first. I told my students it is easiest to write the number sentence first.  We then decided that writing the story would be the next logical step before writing the question. Drawing the picture next would have been fine too. As for the drawing, we discussed how spending a lot of time drawing birds over and over again would not be a good use of our math time so we decided that it would be fine to use X's to represent the birds.

I then sent them off in pairs to work on their own problems. They were instructed to not use the problem we had come up with as a class. My students really enjoyed this activity. They are also enjoying working with their compass buddies. One thing that I have learned from this Capstone project so far has been that I was not giving my students enough time to work in pairs on math questions. It is so nice to be able to walk around and hear all of the math talk going on.

Their picture of the birds on the wire is great! 

Reasoning Puzzles

As part of my work on math Literacy, I am aiming to have my students work together more in partners or groups of three. Hopefully, this will facilitate more Math Talk. This week we worked on Reasoning Puzzles. I found these fantastic puzzles here at Teachers Pay Teachers.  I originally found them through her fantastic blog- Beyond Traditional Math.  (Take a look around her blog, you wont be disappointed!) It was great to be able to walk around the room and hear all the talk going on. "What is a digit?", "Which one is the hundreds box?" and  "How come you are putting that one there?" are just a few of the questions I heard.

The students were given two sheets, one that just said True/False and then the other with an equation with empty boxes in it and then facts down below. Together with their partners they had to figure out what numbers went in the boxes and then read the facts below. They cut up the facts and placed them in the appropriate columns.

 One thing that became apparent to me was that I had not left enough time for a debrief at the end of the lesson. i am going to include that in next time. Over my years of teaching, I have become a firm firm believer in repeating similar style lessons or activities. The first time that you introduce a new idea, it is foreign to students, the language may be new and how to approach the activity will be intimidating to them. I plan to spend a few days per month working on these puzzles together with our compass buddies.  Some students were puzzled by some of the statements and had a hard time deciding which ones were true or false. Others seemed to approach very methodically and used a process of elimination.

Next time, I think I will just give them one set of sheets between them. this first time, I gave each person their own sets of facts and true/false sheets. This was a good way for everyone to start out knowing how to cut up the pieces and place them in the two columns. Hopefully on the second time with there just being one sheet between them, it will encourage even more talk.

Math Literacy Bags

Our math Literacy bags are starting to take shape. This is something very new to me and an exciting part of my research project for my Capstone class. After coming up with some Math resources that I want my students to use over and over again, I decided that a ziploc bag would be the perfect place to store all of our Math Literacy items. These are going to be fun to use over the year.

In the bags we have:

Our Journals were added first 

1. Interactive Math Journals 
I scoured the internet and found many great resources for Math journals and prompts. I now have a large collection of prompts that should last me thoughout the year! I took all of the prompts and sorted them. These journals will consist of three main kinds of entries-
     1.) Concept or task prompts- these are actual questions or word problems to answer and show your work and ideas:
      Ex./ Joe has 19. Sam has 30. Who has more cars? How many more? How do you know? Show how you figured it out. Explain what strategy you used to solve this problem.
     2.) Process prompts- these are more of the how do you style prompts. some examples are:
    -Write a letter to your teacher explaining what you understand about the topic                              
      - When I read a math textbook and see a word that I don’t know, I ...
      -How did I get the solution?
     -Describe the graph of…as if you were explaining it to a friend over the phone.
     -When I see a word problem, the first thing I do is…then I…
     3.) Affective prompts- these are more personal
       -I want to become bette at math so that I…

       - People who are good at math…

       -My best/worst experience with math was…

       -When it comes to math I find it difficult to…

       -When I hear someone say “Math is fun!” I…

       -Describe what mathematician  does.

       -If I were better at math, I would…

A great vocabulary package

2. A Math Vocabulary Reference book
I found this fantastic resource at K-5 Math Resources website. I have printed off the Math vocabulary reference book and added it to the math bags. This booklet should last all year as it contains words from all of the domains that we will cover over the course of the year. I purchased this package from K-5 Math Teaching resources as part of a grade 3 bundle. It came with a journal prompts booklet, a math projects booklet (more to come on this!) and this vocabulary package. In my opinion, it has been a great value so far. You can find the bundle here. 

3. Math vocabulary word books
I found these freebies on teachers pay teachers.  They use the Frayer model for vocabulary development. I love how this model uses examples and non-examples as these are perfect for Math. we will add our new words to these books as we go. You can grab these freebies here. 

Our Compass buddy chart

4. A compass buddy chart
I LOVE this idea. You may have heard of the idea of Clock buddies before. Laura Candler has taken this idea and transformed it into a compass! Perfect as it will also meet the goal of having students familiar with direction and a compass.   You can download the sheet that we use here. 

Fill-in and add to the bags 

Our Math Talk Prompt sheet facing out

5. Partner math talk prompts

 I found a partner literature talk sheet for free and changed the prompts from literature prompts to Math prompts. In our bags, we have this sheet facing out so students can use it for reference easily. I have also gotten them to place their compass buddy sheet on the opposite side facing out for the same reason. Our journals and vocabulary books are sandwiched in the middle. You can download the sheet I made here. 

Becoming Mathematicians

We began our first lesson by deciding what a good mathematician does. I found this cute little activity from Amy Lemons great blog here. This was a bit hard for some of the students to get their heads around. many of them answered, "Does math really good." I gave a few examples and then helped prompt them for a few before they started to get the idea and came up with some good ideas on their own. We created an anchor chart to put up in the classroom throughout this unit. To help solidify the idea of the students seeing themselves as mathematicians, we made self portraits with speech bubbles. in the speech bubble they wrote "I can.." or "I..." and what it is that they do in Math that makes them a good mathematician. You can see them in the photo below. They turned out cute! I loved that one of my girls wrote, "I do not give up. FOREVER."

Our Mathematician Chart

We also looked at these cute little Mathematician posters. They go through the parts of the body and how each part helps you do math. I bought these posters from Teachers pay Teachers for $1 and found them here. I liked how demonstrated the idea that mathematicians use all parts of their body to do Math.

Mathematician Posters above our sink