Great Thinkers Wanted

This year I decided to use the space on the wall to extend my teaching. The Think Tank board is one example of an interactive bulletin board in my room. Each week I will place a different task on the board. The students have the whole week to solve the task and write their answer on the back of one of the blue fish that you see in the little container on the bottom left of the board. After they write their answer down, they write their name on the front of the fish and staple it to the board. On Friday, I take all of the fish off of the board and check the answers. The fish that are correct go into the fish bowl that you see on the blue shelf. Once every couple of weeks I draw out 5 fish and those students will get to eat lunch with me in the classroom. The board also serves as a quick assessment tool so that I can see who is understanding a particular concept and who will need a little reteaching.

The Think Tank tasks can cover grammar skills, math, reading strategies, or anything that I want to review. My goal is to put up tasks that require students to use problem solving skills. I find that word problems in math are especially challenging for second graders. For some reason they shut down whenever they have to "think" past basic computation. Hopefully the Think Tank will help turn my students into fearless problem solvers!