Math Key Words Artifact

I create an artifact for Math Key Words to help guide the students when solving Expressions and/or Equations. The artifact is posted in the room for the entire year and the students also make their own. To create this artifact, we do this 4 Corners Activity.

1. Each student has a card with a word that means one of the operations on it (i.e. sum, per, altogether, etc.)
2. The students have a few minutes to discuss with their groups what operation they feel their word means.
3. The students then move to 1 of the 4 prelabeled corners (Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division).
4. Each student uses the sentence frame: "I have (word) and it means (addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division) because (explanation). If the students are incorrect, the other students in the class get to correct them using Accountable Talk/Math Sentence Stems. The incorrect student then moves to the correct corner and says their statement again, correctly.
5. Then together we create the poster.
6. The students must write small enough that we can add to our poster at any time.
7. The students are also writing the information from the poster into their Math Journals.

There is an extra section for words that means Equal too, but we add that later after the 4 Corners Activity.

Here is an example of one we created...