Math journals!

Hello all! Sorry about my absence! Somebody in our family has been sick every week so it's made for an insane winter! On to the reason I blog, my love for teaching...

Our principal brought up the idea of math journals the other week in our faculty meeting and how they have proven to be highly effective in bringing up test scores! I was a little critical at first, thinking it was just more time and work for teachers. However, as our coach began to show some examples, I began to get excited! It was a way to almost "keep a portfolio" of all the cool stuff we do! It was also a way to keep rhymes and nomonic devices for kids to refer to when reviewing a concept! I was now excited about starting these journals! 

On my way home from school, I zoomed into the Walmart parking lot and ran inside to buy a stack of notebooks for my students! The next day, I was ready and raring to go. The student could tell I was excited and as I always say, "excitement is contagious!" Thus, we began our math journals!  

We have implemented them the last couple of weeks and let me show you the results....

First attempt: Missing parts into the hundreds!

Second attempt: Subtracting 3 digits with regrouping.

Third Attempt: Logical Reasoning (several step problems) I loved their explanations for how they solved it! The kids are wowing me with their ability to explain!

Then we started our money unit!

We needed to make sure they recognized the coins before we dove into counting collections of coins.

They explained how they differentiated the coins to count them...

As I realized that some kiddos were having trouble counting by 25s, 10s, and 5s, we added this to our journal...

So far, I'm loving it! It's really not a lot of work because there are so many free resources out there on TPT! 

Also the students are actually saying, "Can I use my math journal?"

My answer, "Yes! Yes! Yes!"