Stations/Centers for the Year

This year, I have been moved from Social Studies back to English, specifically Writing and Grammar. Happy, happy, joy, joy! I wasn't real happy at first, but the idea has been growing on me lately. Besides working on writing and grammar, my class is a resource class for all the other subject areas within the team: Science, Math, Social Studies, and Reading. And the team I'm on teaches all three grade levels (6th, 7th, and 8th). My class has no set curriculum to follow as I am a resource class, so I had lets of fun figuring out what I wanted to do. The first thing I did was to think back to what my children got excited about in their classrooms over the last several years and that would be centers or stations. So I decided that that would be how I set up my classroom. Here are the 6 centers/stations I have come up with. All 3 grade levels will have the same centers, but geared to what they are learning.

1.    Language Review (Focus for the day) - This will be how we start class every day. I found a wonderful workbook for each of the grade levels that has worksheets set up for every day taking about 5 minutes. Here is a picture of the Grade 7 one.

2.    Journal - Students will journal for 5-10 minutes on a given prompt every day. Students will then pick one journal entry from the week before to work into a paper in the writing station. I found a Point of View Write About Flip book at the Teacher's Touch & Parents Too store in Myrtle Beach this summer that I thought would be perfect. It allows the students to create 1000s of different prompts.

3.     Grammar - This station is going to follow what the grade level writing teachers are teaching in their classes. I figure 2 days of notes or anchor charts followed by 2-3 days of practice.

4.     Vocabulary - the students will get 16 new words a week: 4 from science, 4 from social studies, and 4 from reading with a quiz every Friday. I am going to have them create their own dictionary for the 3 different subjects.

5.     Reading Comprehension - Teachers always have those one page readers with a 1/2 page of questions that they always want to include in their lessons, but don't have the time. Well now I'm going to make the time for them. I want to do this station as a when you get down with your work activity or as homework. The students would have 3 readings a week: one each for social studies, science, and reading.

6.     Writing Station - This is the station where the students will work on turning their journal prompts into 5 paragraph essays in preparation for their state writing test in 8th grade.

Not all stations will be completed every day, but they will all be completed over the course of the week. By doing stations this way, I will have time to sit down and have writing conferences with students on a weekly basis.

I will keep you all up-to-date on how these work out once school starts.

Robyn