F is for Four Corners

I'm sure you know what teachers do when we find out that another school is doing something that works...we BORROW the idea!

Some of my colleagues at my school heard about a strategy a comparable Title 1 school was doing to raise math scores. In fact, they have the highest math scores in the county. (Go R.B. Cox Elementary!) The idea is simple, but obviously highly effective. Many of you may do it already.

They called it Four Corners. The teachers put up a question to review/preview skills or provide more practice on current skills and students solve the problems in their math journals.

We have discovered that our students don't read through the word problems so they can understand how to solve them. Anybody else having that problem? So to prepare them for their future math experiences, we decided to jump on the Four Corners train.

One of my lovely teammates happens to have a final intern in her classroom, so she stepped up and created a page for each day of our unit. (You rock Harper!) Of course I had to cutsie it up so I made a template for her to work on.

Here is an example of one day:

Here are a couple of examples of my students' work. They sit on opposite sides of the room and had very similar thinking.

I love how the kids are so excited to do these daily. Hopefully, that will last. And let's also hope that our data looks super fantastic so we can prove how clever our little darlings are.

You are welcome to use the image of my template. All I did was insert the image into my PowerPoint presentation and we added text boxes for the word problems.

Can't avoid that data collection! =}

 

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