Pre-Assessments, Centers, Guided Groups Oh My!

Let me start off by stating that I am influenced by many people when I write and create!  So if any of this sounds familiar, its because I have done a lot of research and stalking of many, many, many people to get ideas and suggestions from.  I think most good teachers should do that!  Of course we have our original ideas too but many things most teacher do are similar in nature or what I like to call best practices.  So, that being said let me describe some important parts and procedures I have in place for my math block.

First, I start every unit with a pre-assessment.  I usually give the pre-assessment a week or so before the end the unit we are on so I have time to plan my next unit. Here is a example of a few questions from a pre-assessment I have given.

Here I gave the same question in three different levels to see what type of numbers the students need to be working on. 






Then I take the scores and levels of the students and create some fun centers, interactive notebooks, word problem stations, and guided group lessons.

The following are some tiered interactive journals that I have created based on the scores that I received from the pretest.

 Each student knows what number bag to do and if they get that finished they can do another one!

I also have differentiated centers students go to and scaffolded word problems students are working on.  Not all students go to all centers during the week either.  They also meet with me once or twice depending on their needs as well.

Here are a few centers I have for this unit as well...

I added pumpkins with numbers on  them depending on what numbers they needed to work on based on one of the questions on the pre-test.

I have tons of fun coming up with these activities and just finished a greater than, less than, equal to one that is going to be observed by the administrators from our entire district so fingers crossed everything runs smoothly!