Once again, I have Sara Carter to thank for many of the wonderful posters that I have put up in my classroom. Two of the posters that I put up were her ‘Types of Errors’ and ‘Always Show Your Thinking’ posters. A few of my math colleagues were in my classroom and we began a discussion about these posters, and as a result of the discussion we made a few changes:
- We changed the word ‘parentheses’ to ‘brackets’. This is more of a USA vs Canada thing. (Similarly, for order of operations we use BEDMAS instead of PEMDAS.)
- We decided to take out the word ‘failure’ under Problem Solving and we adjusted some of the descriptors for that section.
We discussed the fact that we like the ‘Types of Errors’ poster and think it is important, and we agreed that it reflects the types of errors that we point out to our students. However, we felt that we also wanted to focus on positive things the students can do to achieve success. We decided to put up a new series of posters under the ‘Types of Errors’ poster. These posters will be framed in the positive, with the heading ‘Aim for Success’. The posters are as follows:
- Always Show Your Thinking (Sarah already did a fabulous job with this one, no changes were necessary.)
- Read and Follow Instructions Carefully
- Show Your Work Vertically
- Line Up Your Equal Signs
- Explain Your Understanding
- Check Your Work
- Write Neatly
- Ask Questions
- Work Collaboratively
- Solve Using Multiple Strategies
Did we miss anything essential? It may end up being too many posters, but we will live with it for a bit and see how it works. You can download the Word and PDF versions of the posters here.
