Busy Week

Mondays are always busy with excited students returning from weekends. I began the day like most any other, administrative tasks completed quickly and headed out to classrooms. We are hosting Coffee with the Principal on Wednesday morning and my agenda contains a slot to explain Thinking Maps and uses on our campus. I walked looking for examples and decided to take a few pictures for those that may not make the morning invite. My goal is to demonstrate the usefulness and ease Maps can be used in all subjects.

The Tree Map for Physical States of matter is posted as an Anchor Chart for students to refer throughout the unit or lesson.

 The Circle Map here is turned into an opportunity for students to apply what they already know of the word from prior knowledge and deepen the understanding of newly acquired vocabulary

 The above Brace Map displays the whole to part and used her to demonstrate Prime Factorization of Exponents. The Double Bubble Map below demonstrates similarities and differences in the attributes of  given numbers.

Our whole campus uses the Thinking Map tools and strategies in our daily instruction. I have shown in earlier posts Flow Maps used in kindergarten through third grade in Art classes. The pictures above are all from 5th grade classrooms. We believe the use of these maps allows for immediate differentiation and learner centered instruction. A quick review of Marzano's Classroom Instruction that Works will demonstrate the strategies flow well with the maps such as: Identifying Similarities and Differences- Non linguistic Representations to name a couple.


Morninside Elementary will be hosting Thinking Maps Trainings in July and October. If interested contact through twitter and I can send you some information.

Howell Out
@MES_Principal