Elementary Math Anchor Chart Hacks That Save Time and Space
Before becoming a teacher I worked for a digital math curriculum company. I would visit teachers in second through fourth grade and help them implement the program with their students. Some classrooms looked like they were from a perfect Pinterest board! Others were so messy and cluttered I felt like turning around and running the other direction as soon as I walked in.
A huge part of this clutter was anchor charts! I couldn’t believe how many anchor charts teachers had posted around their classrooms. I wondered how in the world students knew where to look for the information they needed.
My classroom certainly wasn’t a perfect Pinterest classroom, but it wasn’t messy either. I figured out several anchor chart teacher hacks that kept my room organized and saved me from having to start from scratch every year. In this blog post I’m sharing:
How to organize anchor charts in your classroom
A quick method for making mini anchor charts for your students
Creating fill in the blank anchor charts to reuse every year
So if your classroom is in disarray or your students can’t find what they are looking for, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s get started.
How to organize anchor charts in your classroom
First, you’ll need to choose one wall in your classroom to designate for anchor charts. If you are teaching a self-contained classroom, you can organize your anchor charts by subject (math, reading, science, and social studies). If you are departmentalized you can still organize your anchor charts by subject (math and science for example), or you can organize them by more specific categories (fractions, word problems, geometry etc).
Supplies you’ll need:
Let’s say you are teaching a self-contained classroom and are organizing your anchor charts by subject area. Start by hanging two command hooks per subject area on your designated wall. Then punch two holes at the top of each anchor chart, and thread one binder ring through each hole. Using the binder rings, hang the anchor charts on the command hooks, and you’re done! The binder rings work great because you can add more anchor charts throughout the year, and you can flip them over easily.
My anchor chart wall using command hooks and binder rings.
A quick method for making mini anchor charts for your students
This leads to the question, how will students see old anchor charts if they are being covered by new ones? This is why it’s important to create copies of each anchor chart that your students can keep inside their math binders.
To do this, you’ll need a scanner app on your phone to convert your anchor charts to PDF documents. I used CamScanner which allowed me to take a picture of the anchor chart with my phone, convert it to a PDF, and then print copies for my students. This gives them an easy way to find the information they are looking for while keeping your room free of clutter.
Creating fill in the blank anchor charts to reuse every year
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!
Some examples of fill in the blank anchor charts converted to PDFs using CamScanner.
