21st Century Anchor Charts

    I can't believe it's October already!  I don't know about you, but I love Fall!!!!  Cooler weather (which here in Florida means the low 80's), Halloween, pumpkins, football...what's not to love?  As some of you know, we are departmentalizing this year which means I now have a  morning class and an afternoon class.  It's taken a lot of getting used to, but now that we're getting in the swing of things, I'm starting to like it.  It really gives me the chance to focus solely on math/science.

    One of the things I've had to get used to is making anchor charts.  The first time I started making one this year with my morning class, I got about halfway through it when I realized that I would need to do it again with my afternoon class, which meant using another piece of chart paper.  Now, I don't about y'all, but we are SERIOUSLY limited on funds, which means we have to be really careful about what we use.  So I got to thinking about how I could continue to make anchor charts for both classes and save paper.  I did see a cool post about using post-it notes to make anchor charts for each class.  I was going to put the link here, but I can't remember where I saw it.  If you know who posted this, let me know so I can put the link.  So I got all excited about that until I started to think about how many sticky notes I might have to get.  Sticky notes = money.

    Hmmmm....how to make 2 sets of anchor charts without spending a lot of $$$.  Enter the anchor charts of the 21st century:

Here is an example of a KWL we made on pumpkins.  The first two show my morning class - what they know and what they wonder.  After reading some books about pumpkins, we then added what we learned.  I added a small yellow star each time we answered one of their "I wonder..." questions.  The second 2 show my afternoon class.  As you can see, we hadn't written about what we learned yet.  We can then pull up each chart when needed, or you can print them out if you want them to be hung up for the kids to access anytime.

After doing these, I did have another thought.  You could also create one large chart after both classes have created their individual ones by combining the ideas of both classes.  I'm thinking about doing this with our owl unit next week.




I'll leave you with a smile.  I don't think I posted this back in September when we did it (but if I did, hey - I'm gettin' old and forgetful).  We read Officer Buckle and Gloria and then the kids had to write out a safety tip which we then bound into a class book.  Here is one of my favorites:

It says, "Don't wear high heels to school!"  Gotta love my girlie girls!