Anticipation Guides

Have you ever used anticipation guides in your classroom?  While I was reading Guided Math by Laney Sammons this summer, she discussed a variety of activating/teaching strategies to use with your students.  This was an area that I really wanted to work on this school year.  Looking back over the past few weeks, I believe I have really stepped up my game with activating/teaching/summarizing strategies.  This is partly due to the format I am using for my lesson plans this year.  Each day, I have an area designated for activating/summarizing strategies.

Today, I used an anticipation guide as my activating and summarizing strategy.  If you teach CC, this is something you can use with the 4th grade standard of comparing multi-digit whole numbers.  This is what the guide looked like.

There is an area on the left that we answered with T/F {true/false}.  Basically, I took the majority vote, having the students give thumbs up for true or thumbs down for false.  Then, we came back to this at the end of the lesson.  I actually answered the last two {which I love.. makes you go hmmmm...} during small group today.

This is what the guided looked like at the end of the lesson.  We went back and evaluated our choices from the beginning of the class based on our discussions during small group.  This is also a great way to determine if students got it or didn't during the lesson.

Anticipation guides are also a great way to introduce/use vocabulary.  For example, here I used the word least in the third statement because this is another word to use when discussing smallest numbers.

I also wanted to share these cute dry erase pockets that I just couldn't wait to get my hands on.

Here we were comparing small four-digit numbers using base-ten blocks {our version}.  The top row is for our first number and the second row is for our second number that we are comparing.  Here's how the numbers looked once we illustrated them with base-ten.

We talked about why our thousands cubes were illustrated with a square and a 10.  I was surprised that students realized that thousands and hundreds had the same object, but the thousands had a 10 because it takes 10 hundreds to create a thousand. These two numbers we were comparing also opened a great opportunity to discuss the importance of looking at the greatest place first.  We discussed how the bottom number seemed to be larger than the top because it had 'a lot going on.'  Students were able to explain that the top number was in fact the larger of the two because it has more thousands than the bottom.  I was impressed!

The bottom two numbers here were a great example of why statement #3 is not always true.  Statement #3 of the guided stated that the least/smallest number will be the number with the least amount of digits.  Although this is possible, it is also possible to have the same amount of digits and have one be smaller.  It isn't always the number with the least amount of digits.

Our lesson today was really great, and I loved using the anticipation guided to activate my students, get them thinking and talking, guide my small group, and summarize/reflect on our lesson.  I don't know of many things that can do all that!

Have you ever had success with an anticipation guide?