This has most likely been posted before, but I am looking to see what centers are in Kinder. I will be coming from first grade. Do you start the year with a writing center, or is that too early? I'm thinking these centers:
ABC, Listening, Big Books/books, math manipulatives, puzzles/blocks/games, computer, pocket charts, what else?? I'm not sure what to expect from Kinders at the beginning of the year!
Looks like you have a good start. You could add some things for science such as discovery bottles, magnets, a microscope. I have a write the room, they use mini white boards and markers. I would also add an Art center with markers, plain paper, construction paper, scissors and glue sticks.
I would talk to my fellow K teachers for ideas. Each district has its own curriculum. In our district we must do Balanced Literacy Centers and can not mix and match with science/math/area type centers. I think you are on the right track though. Add lots of phonemic awareness activities. I have a center that my para runs from the beginning of the year called Word Way and all she does are phonemic awareness activities. Makes a big difference.
Judy is correct about checking with the district. We are Reading First and are suppose to do only literacy centers. However, almost anything can be a literacy center. For example, matching sets to numbers is a math center, but when finished write the number words--now it is literacy. Most of our teachers have figured out how to use literacy in different ways.
Anyway, I was observing a room in a different district and the teacher had a sticker station. The kids used stickers to make a picture, then wrote about the picture. I am already looking for stickers for next year.
I love your sticker center......it sounds really like something my kids would love. I have to figure out how to keep them from decorating themselves...especially in the beginning of the year. We are also reading first.
At the beginning of the year we do lots of lessons using student names and we have lots of literacy centers with names too (matching name cards to pictures, unscrambling the letters in names, sorting names by first letter, etc.) Our first writing center activity is to make a card for a friend. The students have to find their friends name card & write "To ____ From ____" and then draw their friend a picture.
I tried the sticker stories this year as a center and I told my kids only three or four for each story. I also made "flashcards" where I put some of the stickers on index cards and wrote the words on them & put them in a mini pocket chart. This helped my reluctant writers to get started. I encouraged the kids who could use inventive spelling not to use the cards. Before long, the reluctant writers were using new stickers and trying to write the words on their own! The stickers are such a huge motivator!! I started the sticker stories after Christmas, after we had done lots of story writing practice as a whole group. (It also helped to post helpful sight words we've learned as the "connector" words when trying to write sentences.)
Thank you all for your responses. The sticker center is a new one for me, I'm going to try that! This year, in first, I bought a lot of the seasonal foam shapes at walmart, along with abc foam letters. I put those at the ABC center, as well as at the writing center.
I do four CENTERS everyday for 15 minutes each for a total of 1 hr. At the beginning of the year I focus on procedure, not the content of the center. The important lessons in the beginning are; routine, feeling what 15 minutes feels like, learning to work independently, cooperating with peers, and having a chance to explore important materials and manipulatives that they will use during the year. You want to wait on deepening the academics and content responsibility of the Centers for a while, to build the important foundation. This solid routine building will result in centers being your favorite time of the day. I start the year with Centers like this:
Pattern Blocks w/ Pattern Cards
Cutting picture out of magazines and making a collage
Play-doh with ABC cookie cutters
Well loved Games like Candy Land and Classic Memory
watercolor or finger painting
wipe off boards
inch cubes
housekeeping/play area
blocks
overhead
Pocket chart
Felt boards
Puppets
Library
puppet theater
Word detective w/ clip boards
Model Magic, Clay, popping bubble wrap or other fine motor building
cut and paste or other page from Mailbox Magazine or Teacher's Helper
finger knitting or weaving or lacing cards
legos or Connexts or other building material
stamp pads and assorted stamps
stickers and glitter glue and postcards
stapled "books" to write and illustrate
measuring objects and sand or water
tape measure, ruler, and assorted objects like feathers and sticks to measure
graph and objects to graph (small pack of m&ms or gummies for exmple)
tracers and colored pencils
Just remember to keep it simple and focus on procedure and team work rather than academics and content. Know that they are learning important skills that will support them throughout the year. Because there is so much literacy learning in Housekeeping/Dramatic play for example, that is a year long Literacy Center and one that I do often. By mid year I have to change my Centers to 3 centers for 20 minutes each because they are trained to enjoy the process more than producing a result to please me. They have a deepen understanding and longer attention span, and they naturally understand the routine of Centers, so they are able to focus on the content of what they are doing with a deepen understanding.
I'm WAY too cheap to buy lots of stickers but I like the idea of the sticker centre. I have a ton of stamps that my son had when he was little so I put out a stamp pad and they put lots of stamps on their papers, draw a few details around the stamps and then write about it. It's not as pretty as stickers but a lot cheaper.
Thank you for the tips for the sticker stories. I only saw the teacher for a couple of hours and I was planning on winging the idea, your tips will help a lot.
We learn about Africa in January so the first sticker stories we did went along with our Africa unit. Lakeshore had some great African Savannah sticker sets with realistic animals. My kiddos loved them. One little girl wrote a whole "story" about zebras. It was adorable!!
There's so many great stickers out there to choose from that the story possibilities are endless. I'm excited to try a few different things next year (still lots of planning to do...)
I love sticker stories, so I just had to weigh in! This year when we studied frogs and the frog life cycle, we put a sticker of a frog in the middle of a piece of construction paper. Then, students had to draw their habitat and write a sentence (using beginning/ending sounds...I teach kinder) to describe their frog...for example, My frog is slimy. We came up with some ideas of what to write about our frogs beforehand and a list of words we might need to know how to spell. We also did this when we did our ocean unit, except with ocean creatures. The students loved it!
05-16-2008, 05:09 PM
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