Anchor Charts

Anchor Charts

    Despite my love for technology, one thing I will never give up making in the classroom are hand written anchor charts. Anchor charts are so important because they make thinking visible. In our grade 1 class, we have various relevant anchor charts around the room. Not only do anchor charts build literacy around the classroom, teachers and students make them together by recording content, strategies, processes, cues and guidelines during the actual learning process. By posting them around the room on various subject boards, current learning is accessible to students and teachers are able to reference them to make connections as new learning happens. 

    The grade 1’s are learning about inferencing and schema right now. After today’s read aloud I created, with the students, two a new anchor charts for their classroom. During my lesson the students were very engaged as I was asking them questions and allowing them to provide input and examples as I was writing.  When the students were asked to go back to their desk and work as a group to fill in their own chart based on the one we created, they were able to reference our chart and use it as a tool when they expanded on ideas or answered questions. A teacher from another room even came in and complimented me on my chart – asking me to come in as a guest teachers and make one for her Grade 1/2 class also, I was flattered. 

    After explaining schema we decided it would be a good idea to tie it into making inferences for the students activity. So we created another anchor chart for them to be able to reference during their group activity. We had the students go back to their group gave them each a picture and asked them to follow the formula from the anchor chart to create an answer. The group activity worked out really well, there were very few questions asked which allowed us to go around to each group and observe student learning.