Centers = Success!

My centers are LOVED!  Who knew?!

So...I started my centers on Thursday.  After one of my teacher buddies (he "lives" in the classroom next door) spent a great amount of time telling me that I needed to drill expectations, I did that, for what seemed like the entire day on Thursday.  B-O-R-I-N-G.  I explained to the kids every expectation until I was blue in the face.  I use CHAMPS in my classroom and we kept referring back to the CHAMPS board and then looking at my "How Centers Work" paper on the overhead.  The eighth point on that paper was that I had high expectations of them and I knew they could handle this because they'd proved it to me.  Then I used the oldest trick in the book, you know, that wonderful guilt trip, and said "don't let me down."  Ugh...I sound like a my mom (love you Mom!).  Finally, I was lucky enough to have help that day.  Our literacy coach spent the entire day in my classroom--major thanks and love to Kathy for that!  She really helped by popping around to the centers when I wasn't able to.

2nd hour was a little too loud, but they worked really well. (This is one of my Title I classes-so I have some students who have been identified as students who need intervention in ELA; we have a certified teacher who works with students in that class.)

3rd hour was a little less loud, but they also worked really well. (This is my co-taught class along with Title I, so we were blessed with four adults in that class--amen!)

4th hour was a gift from God.  This is a very small class; I have 20 kids, and they are amazing.  They were so quiet that we ended up filming them with the iPad to prove to people that this really happened.  Due to privacy concerns, I've chosen not to share the video (sorry!).  On Friday, my principals dropped in for a "walk-through evaluation."  I was really happy they got to see how well my kids were working in centers and how engaged they were.  I think it will be a very positive reaction; however, I'm slightly concerned because one of them asked my students who were working at the Metacognitive Center what they were doing.  Metacognitive is a new term for them, so I don't know what the kids answered!  They were working on visualizing a passage and constructing a picture from the image.  I guess I'll find out soon! :)

(5th hour was lunch--that was really good too because we had Thanksgiving dinner.)

6th hour was also very good; but they're always a little bit more rambunctious than my 4th hour.  We were able to have our Interventionist in with us again which made things run smoothly (but I don't think we needed to have her to run smoothly).

7th hour struggled.  In this class, we have 4 boys and the rest are girls.  Sometimes we have a lot of drama.  :)  This day wasn't any different.  Amazingly it was the group that was working with me! 

That was Thursday; Friday was better for all classes.  For our warm-up on Friday, we talked about what their behavior was the day before and how well their group worked together.  Students were very honest, but they were tactful about it-they didn't name names, but simply said "some of us got off task and we need to do a better job of helping keep each other focused."  

All in all it was a very positive experience.  The kids LOVED it and want to work in centers everyday.

Here are the outcomes:

1.  Everyone loves it.  
2.  I am exhausted by the end of the day, but that's okay because I know that I'm reaching them!
3.  I need to either extend the time they're in the center (I had it at 20 minutes and that didn't work--we weren't finishing, or we were spending too long on the warm-up/directions on day 1) OR lessen the work load at each center.
4.  Make more copies of the directions.
5.  Designate someone to be the director of each group that day/assign daily roles; however, I'm not really sure how to go about doing this.
6.  The materials I need to stay at the center (like reading passages/directions) need to be color-coded.  I lost some of the materials during clean-up and had to track them down.
7.  Come up with a way to make it count as a graded assignment (without having to grade a billion things) so that it keeps them on task when the novelty wears off.
8.  Keep going with it and develop more lessons based on centers!

I feel that I have grown so much as a teacher in the past week!  Yahoo! 

Learning Centers in the Middle School Classroom--Eek?!

As a Michigan teacher, I have a much more stringent evaluation this year than I did last year.  Part of that is to have a rubric goal, and two data goals.  My rubric goal was to challenge myself and include more differentiation in my classroom.  To achieve that, I'm going to start using centers/small groups in my 6th grade English classroom.  So...I've told the parents now that I'm going to start that this week.  Now that that week is upon us..

I'M FREAKING OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have my students broken down into four groups; but none are the same size.  My stronger groups are larger, numbering around 7-8 students and my struggling groups are about 4-5 students a piece.

My class periods are about 55 minutes each.  I'm thinking two cycles, 20 minutes, each class period, and working in centers two days/week.  Probably on Wednesday and Thursday while they're still relatively focused.

As of right now, my four stations will be:

1. Reading with me-here we'll work on comprehension and going deeper into reading; but this will not include the book we're working on as a class.  I need to keep everyone together for that...at least that's what I'm thinking right now (we'll work on our class novel on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays).  I have leveled passages that we'll be working on.

2. Metacognitive-my plan is for the students to work on developing metacogntivie strategies to help build their reading.  They'll focus on one trait/week.  The first week will be visualizing something we've read in class and drawing a picture of it.  They'll then share this with their group and discuss what aspects of the reading hit home with them as far as developing a picture.  Other metacognitive traits will include predicting, making connections, evaluating, inferring, monitoring, prior knowledge, purpose setting, questioning, responding emotionally, and retelling/summarizing (Kaplan's Metacognitive Awareness). 

3.  Vocabulary & Phonics-Vocabulary is the biggest indicator of success.  As of right now, I plan on using mind sketches to achieve vocabulary acquistion.  Furthermore, I have some students who are struggling with phonics...so that's a major concern for me.  I need to bring up this area, and then introduce vocabulary to those students.

4.  Writing-My students will be working on writing cohesive paragraphs using a Power Writing rubric.  The majority (thank God!) of my kiddos know what Power Writing is and understand it.  In my district, we had 3 feeder schools, and so if one student doesn't understand Power Writing, another student in their group will be able to explain it (it's not difficult if you're unfamiliar with it).  The first week we're focusing on organization, which will be with the Power Writing rubric.  

If you've actually made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read through my blog!  I'm going to start blogging more in order to help me think through these things.  Please, please, please leave me some feedback! 

Always,
Monica