Anchor Charts for the WHOLE YEAR

Can you imagine a school year where all of your anchor charts are done before it even begins?

I don’t know about you guys but anchor charts are a huge thorn in my side. If I want to make them in real time with my students (which is research-based and recommended), then I’m not taking my time caring for every little detail and the end result is something that I don’t really want to hang on my walls, because it’s not nice to look at. If I make something ahead of time and make it really pretty, then my students can’t interact with it and it really is more of just a poster instead of an anchor chart. There’s nothing wrong with posters! But if we want to teach using anchor charts then they need to be a tool that both you AND your students are accessing together. Sitting the kids down and reading a poster to them is not nearly as impactful as building an anchor chart together as a class. So, how do we have pretty anchor charts that our students can use, but we don’t have to stress over? I think I have the solution.

INTERACTIVE ANCHOR CHARTS!

Let me tell you how these work:

First, print and prep the pieces of the interactive anchor charts. Most of the pieces in the sets that I sell are black and white to save you an ink so you can print on colored paper of your choice. This works especially well if you have a classroom color scheme you’re trying to stay within, and you want to print everything on the same few shades of paper. Go for it!

Some printable pieces are meant to be used for the interactive portion of this product design. You will want to laminate these and cut them and set them to the side. The other pieces (like headings, definitions, and keywords), can be glued directly to your anchor chart paper.

Next, laminate all of your charts. Yes, you heard me right. Laminate them all! You are going to prep these once right now and not have to re-do them again for many years to come. Laminate like crazy!

Then, store your anchor charts somewhere where you can access them easily throughout the year. The way this is going to work is when you are teaching a new math unit, you’re going to pull out the anchor chart that teaches that topic. You will also have your pre-cut interactive pieces stored somewhere that you can grab and pull them out for the kids to finish the chart with. So, when you’re teaching about even and odd numbers at the beginning of the year, save those ten-frames for the kids to draw in and hang up themselves.

When you’re teaching about comparing numbers, save the bigger than less than and equal to symbols in a plastic bag for when it’s time for the kids to hang up the symbol that best represents the numbers you write on the chart.

My favorite part, other than having a cute anchor chart that you can use over and over, is you can REMOVE the interactive pieces and use the same chart again for a different purpose! Because you laminated everything ahead of time, you can take the chart apart after your whole group lesson, and let the kids re-build it with different numbers during small groups! Or, you can hang it up in centers for kids to work with during a certain activity.

This is the kind of summer project that doesn’t take a lot of time to do, but will save you a ton of stress throughout the school year. I can’t tell you how much I wish I had created this during my first year of teaching, when I would spend hours drawing and re-drawing on chart paper to make it look “pretty enough”, but then my students wouldn’t be able to write on it. This product allows you to have the best of both worlds. You can like looking at what’s hanging on your walls, AND it will be easy and clear for your students to read and understand. Even more importantly, it will actually help your students learn the content because they will help you build it and work with it!

If you like this idea, check out my full listing on TpT! 

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