Centers

Wow these last couple weeks have been flying by! I have lots of different centers to share that we have done in the past few weeks.

Alphabet Centers:

 Pasting split peas on the letter "Pp." The students did really well with this! I was pleasantly surprised by how carefully they placed the peas on their papers. (Go ahead and count all the "p" words I just used, haha!)

 Matching upper case and lower case letters to make acorns. Nice for a fall center and a good review of the alphabet.

The listening center includes a Language Master and two sets of headphones. The cards for the Language Master have the letters of the alphabet a picture and word to go with the letter. They hear my voice say the name of the letter, the sound it makes, and the word on the card. In the bin there are also sight word and sentence cards included, though you can only see the alphabet cards in this photo.





Sight Word Centers:

 Sight Word Graphing - Ms. Conyers found this idea on Pinterest and made her own. She shared it with the team and my class did this with me at my center in small groups so that I could make sure they understood how to color, count,  and graph properly.

 In this center the students chose a word card, then stamped the word and wrote the word twice. The idea of the tray was to contain the messy stamps but I suppose I didn't explain that very well, judging by this picture, haha.

 This one was a big hit and it was another idea I saw on Pinterest. The students had to search in the corn to find letter tiles to match their sight words which I had traced and written on the red paper.

Math Centers:

 I showed the students how to count and match up the numbers on the dominoes.

At this center, students rolled a number cube, wrote the number in a square and then placed that many stickers into the box. The students really love anything involving stickers!









Science Centers:

 The blue manipulatives have textures on the bottom. Students were told to feel the textures without looking and try to match them up. The wooden boxes with knobs make different sounds when you shake them, they listen and match the ones they think sound the same (they can check their answers by checking the colored dot on the bottom).

 At this center, students got to explore some seashells by using magnifying glasses and a scale. Many of them also held the shells up to their ears.

Most recently, we began to study day and night and the earth in space. At one center they cut and glued a sun (and also traced a sentence about the sun) and at another center that they did with me, they used cotton balls and white paint to make the moon, outlined it with glitter glue and used sticker stars around it. They also filled in some words in a sentence about the moon.

Last week we also did a fun activity to learn about the moon phases by using Oreo cookies. Check our classroom Shutterfly site for photos!

Last Week's Centers

I thought I would share how we do centers in my classroom and some of the centers we worked on last week. Our centers are structured. Students are divided up and they spend a given amount of time (generally 15-20 minutes) at each center. We do centers Monday-Thursday and there are three center rotations a day. However, one center each day is always the Teacher Center with me (what they do at my center varies each day). By the end of the week, they have completed all 8 learning centers, plus four different teacher centers.

I use this handy dandy chart to keep track of which centers they are supposed to be at and when. I add sticky notes with the students names on them, written in pencil. Since their abilities change so often, it's nice to be able to easily switch things around when needed. Each column represents a rotation. The numbers correspond to numbered centers I keep written on the board. The red part turns each day. It seem complicated, but it's so easy to get the hang of it. I tell the students before each rotation where they will be going, but by the end of the year they can usually figure it out for themselves.

I always try to integrate a lot of different things into our centers - writing, ABC's, sight words, math, science/social studies.

Here are some of the centers we did this week.

For our letter center, we did a worksheet to practice recognizing upper and lowercase Mm's.

For the math center, students used pattern blocks. We incorporated letters into this center by having them make letters with the pattern blocks. I printed the templates from this site.

For an ABC center, I used a foam puzzle and put the missing letters in a bin of colored rice. They had to search in the rice, find the letter and put it in the puzzle. I found this idea on Pinterest.

Our sight word center involved stamping our sight words "we" and "can" into a sentence. Then they used the pictures to help them read the sentence to their partner and then to me.

We also did a science-related center about our five senses. Students had to sort pictures according to each sense.