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.

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.

Elementary math routines are so important to help students transition from one activity to the next, and with the right ones, can lead to tremendous learning in just a short 10-minute window.

In this blog post I’ll be sharing three engaging math routines that will help students review important skills while giving you time to set up for your math lesson. I’ll be covering:

• Problem of the Day Protocol 

• Elementary Math Shakers

• Number of the Day

So if you’re feeling like your math routines are not impactful or you need some ideas to shake things up a bit, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s get started.

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!

As teachers we are usually told to give a quick quiz at the end of the week, and plan our small groups for the following week based on that data. Early on I tried that approach and it just didn’t work. I had to move so quickly through each standard that students just continually fell behind. It also caused me to have to plan multiple lessons on several different topics at one time, instead of just planning one lesson. It was inefficient and too much work!

There is also no need to make exit tickets or demonstrations of learning. It’s just one more thing you have to create for each lesson and it takes up instructional time. By eliminating this step you can jump right into your first small group as soon as the whole group lesson is over.

But we still need a way to identify students who need help. I did this by incorporating fill in the blank style checks for understanding during my whole group lessons and students would respond on their mini whiteboards using expo markers. I could then quickly see who was understanding the content, and who was struggling.