
How to Use Glyphs in Your Classroom
How to Use a Glyph in the Classroom
There are a variety of tools available to teachers in the classroom. It is essential to engage in multiple teaching methods, mainly when teaching topics that can be confusing or difficult to understand. One tool available for teaching is glyphs.
What is a glyph, and why are they a good activity for teachers
Glyphs, similar to hieroglyphics, are used as pictures that represent specific information. Glyphs are a great way to introduce graphical information to students in learning. Glyphs are a great tool to use for math, science, or social studies. Glyphs help in those subject areas and are an excellent tool for practicing reading comprehension and directionality.
Glyphs are great as they not only encourage students to connect the dots of the lesson through graphics, but they encourage students’ creativity when creating their glyphs.
How a glyph works
For a glyph to work you must first decide how each data point will represent the points you are looking to achieve. For example, my glyph, directs students to decorate their own sports jersey.
Through a math worksheet, each of their answers to math problems are also in a key that dictates how the jersey will be decorated. Such as team name, jersey color and more. As students complete the math problems they will have the information needed to decorate their glyph.

How to use them in the classroom-early finisher, sub tub, center activity
Glyphs can be used as a great option in a variety of classroom plans. They’re a good opportunity to leave for sub plans for students to work on review problems while creating something new. Glyphs are also a great idea for students who complete work quicker than the rest of the class. Having a secondary assignment ready such as decorating a glyph based on the data they gained from their work is an excellent idea to keep students occupied while others are still working.
Glyphs are a great tool to utilize in the classroom to help drive home multiple learning concepts and drive student creativity at the same time.

How to Make a Glyph for the Classroom
You may be curious about using glyphs, but not quite sure how to make one yourself. I’ve made all of my glyphs using Powerpoint, but you can use other programs as well. First, you have to decide what topic you want to have for your glyph. For example, fractions. Then, you have to decide what you want to have your students do-create a football jersey, color a bear, etc.. The options are limitless! I like to set up 3 options as can be seen above. I create a table with 3 columns and 2 rows. I put a question above the table, answer options in the top row whatever I want my students to solve in the bottom row. The key is to give questions that will have different answers. Then, I duplicate (command + d) the table. Put answer choices in the first row and what you’d like them to do in the second row (color the stripes yellow).