Centers

February 11, 2016

This week I added on centers to my work load. Teachers do centers differently in their classrooms so let me explain how they are done here in 1st grade. Everyday after morning meeting we have whole group. Whole group consists of Spelling, Phonics and English. After a brief introduction to each as a class we complete the workbook pages for each subject. After whole group is when we transition into centers. There are 4 centers; Math, Writing, Word Work and Small Group Reading. The groups rotate through all centers each day. Each center has additional practice on what was covered in whole group (with the exception of Math which covers what was learned the day prior).

It was up to me to come up with activities for each center (except for Small Group Reading, which I will add on in two weeks). This took a lot of planning; 3 centers, 5 days, 15 total centers to plan for!

A lot of the activities I found/came up with were new to me and the class. I knew that I couldn't expect them all to go smoothly but I was hoping there were no complete failures. There are no centers tomorrow because of Valentine's Day festivities so I am going to recap the week now. I won't discuss everything but I'll pick out my favorites and my least favorites.

One day there was a 2 hour delay and this meant centers were cancelled. This was disappointing because I was excited to see how my planned activities would work. However, I was able to move some things around and save some of the cancelled activities for next week.

Some centers that were a home run:

Race To A Dollar: Students use a spinner and play money to collect coins. The goal is to be the first one to get $1 in coins.

Kahoot! Adjective Review: Kahoot! is an online interactive quiz website. I am going to have a post next week about this so I won't go too in depth. The students had to read sentences and choose the adjective from the choices provided. The quizzes are done on iPads and the students loved it!

Place Value Bingo: Regular bingo rules, but students must figure out what number is being represented by tens and ones blocks to mark the number off their card.

There was actually only one center that I was really disappointed with:

Spin-a-Word: This was an activity that I found and adapted to meet what we were learning about in Phonics. The original activity used a spinner and each portion of the spinner had different word families (-at, -an, etc.) The students would spin the spinner and add the word family ending to the consonant provided for each number. Some words were real and some were nonsense that were made. At the end you circled and counted how many real words were created. I modified this for our long a and long I patterns instead of word families. This was too advanced for my first graders and most of them really struggled. This would have been a great activity for the beginning of the year when we did word families but my modification just did not work.

I have many new activities planned for next week and I'm looking forward to seeing which ones are a success!