Emily Greider, KLSP
Centers is truly the best part of our day! Our second grade team has done a lot of work and thinking around how to keep centers feeling fresh and exciting in a way that’s sustainable for teachers.
Pinterest is a happy place for most of us and we find a lot of simple ideas there. About every two weeks, my co-teacher and I switch out our sight word centers to include new activities. We’ve used beads on pipe cleaners, magnet letters, playdoh, and alphabet stamps as ways to give our kids opportunities to experience their sight words in a hands-on way. We also use simple, holiday-inspired, writing sheets in plastic protectors as opportunities to practice spelling and writing. These small and simple idea help centers feel exciting for our kids.
In the writing center, we include the week’s read aloud books so kids have an extra chance to interact with the texts and to use them as inspiration for their writing. Our class was especially excited about the chance to write book reviews and recommendations on our favorite Helen Lester books.
We also use a fun incentive in our classroom during centers time. After each rotation, teachers choose a “bookworm” (a gummy worm) based on a positive behavior that we noticed. We recognize children for staying focused on their center, getting to work right away, completing neat work, and for any other thing we notice! This keeps our students engaged and excited because they know they have many chances to earn the bookworm each day.
I think the key to keeping centers alive in classrooms are small, but fun changes every few weeks. I think teachers often feel overwhelmed thinking that they need to overhaul centers each week, but I truly believe that small changes can make a world of difference.
For Love of the Game 