If you’ve visited before, you will know I’m always looking for new ways to save time in teaching. And math is no exception!

In fact, saving time in math can be quite a challenge…there are so many manipulatives and materials to manage!

So I wanted to share three easy ways I save time in math each day. They are super simple, but these strategies have made such a great impact!

PROVIDE Easy Access for most-used manipulatives

One of my favorite ways to save time in math for small group instruction is to make sure our most-used manipulatives are ready to grab.

I use plastic mason jars to store manipulatives like fraction bars, linking cubes, and place value disks:

Organizing them by color helps to make our classroom beautiful.

But it also helps my students find (and return) our most-used manipulatives easily:

Having these manipulatives out and easy to access saves us a great deal of time during our targeted instruction.

Storing INdividual Student Manipulatives

When it comes to individual manipulatives, I love to count materials out ahead of time and store them separately.

You know, those little supplies like counters, dice, and math tiles. It saves SO much time, rather than passing out supplies and trying to make sure each student has enough as the lesson is beginning!

I use little plastic makeup jars to store our individual supplies because they are inexpensive, long-lasting, and take up very little space:

This has been such a help over the years…I have a whole other blog post with more details here: Organizing Math Manipulatives for Each Student

It’s such a little thing that makes a BIG impact on classroom management and saving time!

ORGANIZING DRY ERASE POCKETS

Ok, there’s a little story behind this one.

Do you use dry erase pockets for your math visuals?

I LOVE them so much…but there is one problem with these pockets.

They are so time-consuming to manage!

Each time we need a new visual, I have to pull out one page at a time for each student…it takes up so much time!

I felt like I was always frantically tearing papers out to prepare for my next group or lesson.

To combat this, I started getting more dry erase pockets to house our visuals. And then more…if I had enough pockets, I wouldn’t have to keep changing the papers, right?

But then one day I realized exactly how many dry erase pockets I had accumulated.

(this is a small fraction of my collection):

This was no help at all! I was constantly sifting through stacks of dry erase pockets to find the visuals I needed for my students, wasting more precious time.

So I started storing multiple visuals in one dry erase pocket, so everything was ready to go. Problem solved!

Or maybe not.

It was still a hassle to pull the pages out and try to find the exact one we needed. More shuffling papers, more time lost!

So I started creating Math Mats with Tabs and it was a complete game changer.

These math mats feature little tabs with labels and icons, attached to the math visual:

They create an instant visual menu that my students and I can navigate with ease!

And they are super simple to set up.

I print the pages on card stock and use a paper trimmer to cut around the edges quickly:

Then my students cut out the remaining pieces (just a few quick cuts for each):

And that’s it! We now can store up to 10 math visuals at once! No more tearing through pockets frantically before a lesson.

These dry erase pockets are filled and ready to use for many weeks…even months!

And it gets better.

Since the Math Mats with Tabs are so easy to use, my students can find the exact visual they’d like to use to solve a problem. I love how this has empowered them as math thinkers!

Math Mats with Tabs have become my absolute FAVORITE way to save time in math.

Would you like to take a closer look? This resource is available in the Shop here on my site, or on TpT.

Save Time in MAth

I hope these ideas were of some help! They seem pretty simple, but they really have saved us so much time in math every day!

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How do you like to save time in math? Please share your tips below!