I often hear, “I won’t have time to see each group every day.”, “My math time is very short and there is not enough time to do Guided Math” or even, “I have no idea how to structure Guided Math to keep my students busy without just giving them busy work”. Have you heard yourself say anything like that when it comes to Guided Math? These are the most common statements I hear when teachers are not sure about if Guided Math will be the right fit for their classroom. I want to start this blog series off by saying that ANYONE can find a structure for Guided Math that works for their schedule and the time that they have allotted to teach math every day. Today, I am going to share with you how I have structured Guided Math when I had a longer math block and even when I had a short math block. No matter how long I had for my math block, I was able to use the same structure and just schedule it differently.
Creating Your Guided Math Rotations Structure
The structure that I use for my math block uses the M.A.T.H. acronym. You may have seen this acronym on TeachersPayTeachers or Pinterest before and that is great because you will be somewhat familiar with it. What I want to show you today is how to took this acronym and made it work for my math block! As I explain the structure I have used for the past 4 years, keep in mind that there is no correct way and you may need to tweak this to make it work for your classroom. One of my favorite parts of Guided Math is that it is easy to tweak and make work for any classroom!
Let’s start off by looking at the picture below that shows the M.A.T.H. acronym that is used to structure the actual rotations part of Guided Math. This picture gives a brief explanation of each rotation and if you click on the image, you can download this picture to keep for your own reference!
Creating Your Math Block Schedule with the Guided Math Structure
When creating my schedule for my math block, there are two additional parts of the schedule besides the actual rotations. These two additional parts are included every day in my math block! The first part is the mini-lesson at the beginning (10-15 minutes) and the second part is the closure time at the end (about 5 minutes). The mini-lesson is a time that I go over the learning target and any academic vocabulary for that day. Sometimes, this time is used to go over a problem that was taught previously in the week and students had some misconceptions with it, used to look over/ create an anchor chart or used to review strategies briefly that had been previously taught. I do NOT do the main teaching for that day during my mini-lesson. The main teaching is done in small groups when I can differentiate the instruction and give my students more support. For the closing time, I revisit the learning target and sometimes even use this as a time to go over expectations that were or were not followed that day. I will be talking about this more in a couple weeks when I do a blog posts on accountability and classroom management for Guided Math.
Check out the schedule that I have used the past couple years for a 60 minute math block, in the picture below, Remember, this is NOT the only way to schedule and structure your Guided Math. I will sharing a resource with other examples further down in this blog post to help you get started structuring your math block!
In this schedule, you probably noticed that most days I did NOT teach all 4 rotations. Occasionally if my math block was longer that day or if I did not need to do as long of a whole group mini-lesson, I would do 3 rotations in a day, but that was not most days. I found that by having longer rotations and less a day, I was able to work more closely with my small groups during the teacher time. If you have a longer block of time, you may be able to fit in more rotations each day. You may have to try out a couple different schedules to find out what works best for you!
For those of you who have signed up for my e-mail notifications on this blog series, you received an additional resource in the email for this blog post to help you with creating the structure of your math block! Want to receive additional resources throughout this blog series? Click the button below to sign up for email notifications that include additional resources to help Guided Math work successfully in your classroom!
How do you teach and monitor progress and if students grasped the skill if you don’t see each student daily?
Thanks for your question! I will actually be addressing this in a couple weeks in this series. So, keep an eye out for the answer to your question soon!