To this day, I still can’t believe how much work goes into planning just one day of elementary math lessons. I spent my entire first year teaching strategizing ways that I could reduce my prep work in math and enjoy teaching it all at the same time.

With all of the different representations students are expected to know, I always felt like I was rushing through the math standards and just skimming the surface so that I could cover everything I needed to by the end of the school year. The system that was in place with textbooks, worksheets, and math centers just wasn’t working for me or my students. I was determined to find a better way to teach elementary math.

Teachers do not have it easy. Early mornings, tons of prep work, pressure to get good test scores, lack of resources, dealing with bad student behavior, under-involved parents and overly involved parents, being reassigned grade levels with no say in the matter. You name it, I’ve been there. 

My first year teaching I taught second grade at a very low performing urban public school. For anyone who has taught in that kind of environment, you get it (read my story here). It causes stress like no other. I later taught third grade at a wonderful private school, and that also came with stress. So it doesn’t really matter where you teach (a homeschooling parent, a tutor, a college professor) teaching is HARD plain and simple. 

I actually couldn’t quite wrap my head around it during my first year teaching. When I’d be getting ready for the next day, I’d think to myself that I’d always have to be making copies, creating new anchor charts, rereading the teacher editions because there was no way I’d be able to memorize every lesson for every subject every year. I wondered if there was a way to eliminate 90% of this work so that I could focus on the part of the job that I loved, which was teaching.

Well I figured out a way to do it, and the results I had were astonishing.

Your first year teaching, or starting in a new grade level, is always challenging because you are learning the content, planning how to teach the content, and adjusting lessons as you go based on how your students perform. You learn a lot during that first year, and each subsequent year you get better at teaching that grade because you are able to anticipate common student misconceptions.

Early on in my teaching career, I didn’t quite understand the importance of teaching elementary math vocabulary to my 2nd and 3rd graders. I knew they wouldn’t be standing around at the playground discussing addends and minuends, and I thought if these terms were not going to be used in everyday life, how important can they really be?

Yes it’s true that to some extent students need to know academic vocabulary to be able to answer test questions (“What is the sum?”, for example), but it does go beyond that. Teaching students vocabulary words when introducing new concepts in math can really help them understand the content better because you are able to explain things more clearly.

One of the first and most important tasks that elementary teachers undertake at the start of the school year, is the creation of instructional calendars. These calendars serve as roadmaps for the entire school year, outlining the specific topics and skills that will be covered each month. The development of instructional calendars is a time-consuming process that requires careful planning and consideration of numerous factors.

My first year teaching I would spend hours after school creating anchor charts for the next day. I wanted to avoid having to make them from scratch every year, so I decided to create fill in the blank style anchor charts that I would laminate and fill out with expo markers. 

This worked incredibly well for my English language learners because I would distribute copies of the anchor charts to each student and we would fill them out together! At the end of the year, I just wiped away the expo marker and used the same anchor charts again the following year. This strategy saved me hours of time!