Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Spring Centers [What we are up to this week]

My students LOVE the Word Work center. They are always SO engaged. This month we had a ton of different skills going on during centers.
This week we worked on building, reading and writing sentences. 
They can work on the floor or in a pocket chart, wherever they feel comfortable! After they build their sentences, they have to use a pointer to read their sentences.  I usually have 2-3 students working together in a center so they will all take turns.
When they are finished, they will complete their activity sheet. They have to color the image, build their sentence, and write the sentence correctly.
We also worked on 'Farm Families'. We have an upcoming field trip to the farm so this center was perfect timing! Students had to look at the picture on the farm animal card and determine what word family it belonged to.
When they were done sorting, they had to sound out the CVC words to record them on their activity sheet (double sided). 
We are continuing to work on differentiating between long and short vowels.  This week we sorted images based on vowel sound. Some of my students needed to use the 'check it' card to complete this activity which was ok with me.  Just lets me know that we need to keep on working!
This next center is definitely one of my favorites. It works on reading CVC words and identifying rhymes (word families) at the same time!

Students will read the sentence on the rhyming question card, then they will find a matching card that rhymes. They did AMAZING with this!!
When they are finished matching all of the rhymes, they record them on their activity sheet.
Over at magnetic letters we worked on spelling our CVC words. Never enough CVC practice!
Then a new skill we have been working on is ending punctuation. We are forgetting it too often in our writing so hopefully these centers will help! Students had to read the sentence and determine whether a question mark or a period was needed to complete it. 
Another great center going on is reading simple sentences and finding the picture to match.  I am going to work on creating an entire pack just like this center because my students loved it and it is really helping my readers! 
I only have one reading group that still needs to work on beginning sounds; however, I left this center out for all of my students to complete. When they saw it they were all excited about it, so I figured why not? Let them all work together and have some fun building Easter eggs!
We worked on rhyming again! Same skill, different words!
Then we stepped up our magnetic letter center a little bit to work on digraphs.  My students are actually doing very well with these and this center was the perfect practice.
Most of these centers can be found in my April Word Work pack HERE on TpT.  The Magnetic Letter Digraphs pack can be found HERE.

What are you guys up to this Spring? What themes do you teach?

Don't forget to PIN the image below to save these ideas for years to come!