HELP! How Do You Manage ALL Those Literacy and Math Centers?

There are many, many ways to run and operate centers. The main thing is for each teacher to find a way that they can easily manage, organize, and operate so that they can effectively pull small group for instruction!

MINI LESSON

I always start literacy centers with a mini lesson.

• The mini lessons scaffold children for effective use of centers.
• It helps them build up options for using the various supplies.
• This time of the year, the mini lessons are super important. We are establishing all of those routines and procedures.
• This week we are introducing the management board. There again, there are lots of options here. Just keep it easy and simple! 

HAVE TOS:

Once we have finished the mini lesson we send the kids off to work.

• We establish 5 center groups. These are mixed abilities, mixed personalities, etc. These are the kids they will work in centers with!
• We have 5 center areas. Each group will go to an area. They stay in the same area the whole time!!!!
• In each area there is one have to activity. This is an activity that is easy enough for 90% of your class to do unassisted.
• Each day they go to a different area. In 5 days they will have completed all 5 have to’s.

CAN DOS

Once they have completed their have-to, they can choose from the can do choices.

• The choices are all stored in the same area of the room as the Have to Activity.
• They are added gradually as they are introduced in mini lessons.
• While mini lessons have been conducted to show children how to use the supplies, creativity and original thoughts and ideas are praised and celebrated.

You can check out these resources to get more information on literacy centers.



Does your table look like this? Yep! It’s prep day. We try to prep for a month at a time. It is easier to prep it all while all of the supplies are out. The print and go I Can cards have really made it easy!

So what about Math Centers? We do them the exact same way!

MINI LESSON

We always start with a mini lesson.

• We are working on shapes and building our anchor chart. The picture on the left shows the chart “in progress”.
• We make our charts ahead, and then each day we just “reveal” the next bullet!

HAVE TOS

Then, we have 5 have to activities, just like literacy.

CAN DOS

Then, we have can do activities in each area.

Here are the plans for this week. Super excited to be finishing up Unit 1 Blasting Off! in Reader’s Workshop.


You can download the lesson plans here. Here are the resources we used to plan this week.






Be sure and hop over to Deedee’s blog to see what other teachers are planning for the week!