Making Your Teaching Stick

We teachers love our alliteration, rhymes, and catchy phrases, but I haven't come up with one for this situation.  At each group of desks, one person is in charge of collecting and passing out various tools and such to their group for the week.  As boring as it may sound, they're called table monitors.  This year, I've come up with a handy way of pointing out who those people are.  See the next picture.

Each table monitor has this blue cube thingy on their desk (Target $1 special).  Throughout the year it will be holding onto various things.  Currently, it's holding a small table version of our latest writing workshop anchor chart that's printed on both sides, by the way.  It's one that I wanted kids to think about even after they left the mini-lesson and days after as well.  I found the idea of making small table versions of charts in the book, A Guide to Making Your Teaching Stick by Shanna Schwartz.

So far the table charts are indeed working like a charm.  Just the other day, a boy pointed it out to his neighbor who didn't seem to know what to do next.  I've used them during my conferences as well.  Of course, as we progress through writing workshop and create new anchor charts, this one will certainly be replaced by others that I feel are important enough for kids to see over and over.

(Click on the picture for your own copy.)

If you don't have blue cube thingies, there are other creative ways to display table versions of charts.  The book suggests making table tents, so voila.  Of course, writing workshop doesn't need to dominate this idea.  What about reading charts, math charts, vocabulary words, or words of character?  I'm thinking there are endless options here, and they can all help our teaching stick.