Guided Math in detail!

Well, first of all, let me say Happy New Year!!!!  I hope y'all had a safe New Year's Eve- I was cozy under a blanket watching the second Hobbit movie: exciting, I know!!

I also hope y'all have had an enjoyable Christmas break!  I know I have!!!  Lots of fun family time and lots of Netflix and naps as well!  I'm almost 7 months pregnant now, so it's been nice to relax and spend quality time with my husband and my family.  We have been working on the baby's room (and when I say we, I mean mostly my husband) and everything's still all over the place, which is making us both a little crazy!!  We're making good progress though and are taking advantage of the last few days of break to get it as close to finished as possible!

I wanted to share a little about how I use Guided Math in my classroom.  I've been meaning to do a blog post about this for a long time, but just haven't gotten around to it until now!

I love Guided Math and have been using some form of it for about 7 years now.  When I first arrived at my current school, we taught math in Whole Group only and used our giant student workbooks as our pacing guide.  It was miserable trying to run from desk to desk to make sure that everyone was on the correct page and this was before I had a document camera and projector installed in my classroom!  I remember saying, "Ok, find blue number two," and then going all around to make sure my little sweet first graders were actually on blue number two.  Whew!

Then came Guided Math (and eventually a projector!) and everything changed.  I finally felt like I was actually teaching math to each and every one of my students.  I introduced Math Centers (Workstations) and they LOVED them!!  There is so much learning going on and they just think they are playing math games!  Math is now my favorite part of the day, hands down.

Please feel free to leave me any comments or questions you have in the comments section of this post.  I hope this gives you insight about how wonderful Math time can be in any classroom and I really hope you find something helpful!

*edited to add more detail about my Math Journal time-

I love using the 4 box system.  It's really easy for the kids to get used to as a daily routine.  At the beginning of the year, I introduce just the first two boxes.  We do them together each day and then I give them time to practice some math workstation games.  As the days go on, I add the third box and start to leave blanks in the first two boxes.  Then we add the fourth box and eventually build up to them doing the entire thing independently.  Once they get going, it is SILENT during that time and I love it!  :)

I have always done handwritten journals, but I recently started making them on my computer and trying to get 5 at a time done for the upcoming week.  I just print and post that copy on the document camera and they do the work in their Math Journal spiral notebook.  They come show me when they are done and I quickly check for any major errors.  Then they go to their workstation and we check their journal together after I'm done pulling groups.  Here are some more pictures-