centres in kindergarten

This post is for a fellow teacher, not all of the links are complete.  It will be an official post soon but I want to share the materials with her right away . . . kind of in draft, sorry!

Ashley,

I had a tough time finding a good photo of the centres chart I used.  This one you can kind of see.  Morning names down one side, afternoon down the other.  The centres are down the middle.

Here are the centre cards I used.  I think I used the smaller ones as the big ones took up too much room in the pocket chart.  I permanently glued and laminated #s onto coloured cards leaving room to sticky tack the centre cards on, that way they can change, be re-used.

There are a whole bunch, changed them depending on the centres we had in the room.  Enlarged these to put near corresponding centre or on the bin, tray their materials were on so students knew where to go.

This is the centre wheel Jackie used.


I also have an outline I started of all of the centres for the year by theme and activity, will find and post here.

Leadership job chart, this is easy to change, all of the names and images slide out.

These classroom leader cards need to be printed to photo sized cards 4x6,  I know that's a pain, I'll try to repost it onto 8.5x11.  They fit perfectly into the CD cover envelopes and the picture shows through the window.

John and I both used this self tracking sheet.  Students coloured the centre as they completed it.  They also tracked their partners.  Kind of like the beginning of self-evaluation and self-directed learning.

It was a lot of work BUT I am glad to have it now to know what centres we did, I think you will find up to February.  I also used this to jot down the partners, often students and parents complained their child was never/always with so-an-so this way I had a record.

Some of these I wouldn't do now, I have evolved!  This is still handy for reference.

Things I would change, I would have photos of students on their name cards for sure in K, if the centre image doesn't also have the name I would add it (je peins, je bricole  . . . ).

Calendar should really be an entire year calendar shown at once, more authentic.  Here's a great blog post about how to do that and why.

This is grade 1.

For grade 1 the order or schedule was by time, for K the cards were just in a row and they turned them over when done.  Will post those cards too!

This is k calendar set up.  Rather than have everyone sit through the whole process all year once they are independent it would be a centre for students to set up and do with a partner.