A while back, I saw a picture of these posters on Instagram from Teaching the Distance. I really liked and them and thought of many different uses for them, so I decided to create my own. As the year goes on, and I finalize some of the other ones I’ve been working on, I’ll add them here.
Image from Teaching the Distance.
This is what I came up with.
So far this year, I’ve been using them for the area formulas. I really like being able to “build” the formula as we talk about why it works. I show a lot of gifs to my students during this unit so they can see where the formulas come from. As we were using these, I had the thought that something like this would be really nice for literal equations as well.
To stick them to the whiteboard, I used whiteboard tape like this. The magnets aren’t super strong, so in the future I may try something else, but this is what I had and it works.
My plan for this is to “build” them each day with my classes as we’re starting the unit, and then towards the middle/end of the unit, leave them up on the board until the unit is over.
I also have the ones for order of operations *almost* ready to go. As I’m writing this post, I realized I forgot “exponents”. Ugh. I’ve updated the file and will print it out this week.
Here are a few I made for our unit on linear equations.
Slope
Slope-Intercept Form
Point-Slope Form
Standard Form
It’s hard to see some of the individual pieces in those pictures, but I tried to put words inside the variables to show what it represents.
Here is the link to download the files.
I’m working on ones for slope, the various forms of linear equations, the Pythagorean theorem, and arithmetic and geometric sequences. If you can think of any others I could make, please let me know!
Count It All Joy 
I am a senior at the University of Cincinnati working to get my degree in Middle Childhood Education for Math and Science. I really like this concept of using the white board as a poster. The part perhaps that I like most about it is that you are able to add to it as you work through a lesson. I see this as a great way to build on lessons from the previous day. I think this is a good way to help students bring the lessons together. I can see this serving as a great reference that is very easily accessible for students. What types of benefits to your students or changes have you seen in your students sine applying this to your classroom? Are there any specific subjects in math that you find it tough to make one of these whiteboard posters for?
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The thing I’ve liked the most about these so far is that I’m able to have conversations with students as we “build” the posters, and that we’re able to refer back to them throughout the day. It’s also a good visual for students. I’ve only created them for concepts that have a formula that I want students to understand or something like order of operations.
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Is it possible to get a set that uses all lowercase letters? I don’t use capital letters with my kiddos unless we are talking about area (A), area of the base (B), etc…..especially with slope and x and y variables. I love the idea of using these!!
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Kim, thanks for asking! I’m glad you can see yourself using these. Which ones would you like with all lower case letters? That’s definitely something I could make. I just don’t know how soon I’d be able to get that done –probably not before Christmas. The spacing of the letters and the words inside of them can be sort of cumbersome and time consuming. If I haven’t already, I could share the editable document and you could download the font and make the changes yourself if you’d like them sooner than Christmas. Just let me know!
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Thanks Greta!! I am especially interested in the slope intercept form ones…..I won’t be using them before Christmas, but I can do it either way!
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I just uploaded the new file. It wasn’t as time consuming as I thought it’d be. Also, I’m not really sure why I did that one in uppercase letters -all the others were lower case and I normally use lower case for slope intercept form too. Thanks for pointing that out! If you need anything else changed, please let me know!
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You are awesome!!! Thank so much! Absolutely love your resources and ideas!
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