My Journey to the Centers of the Classroom

So this blog is kind of my captain's log for my teaching journey and one of the most difficult journeys I have had is dealing with centers.  I see all the time these great blogs where teachers are rocking their centers and it makes me feel a little inadequate.  I have to keep reminding myself:

1. I just started teaching.
2. No one is a rockstar the first time they try something (ok some are but I choose not to acknowledge them because jealousy isn't nice lol).

With this in mind I figured I would share my journey with it's ups and downs for anyone else who is trying to find their way through this minefield.  This post is a little bit long, so sorry in advance.

During my year in first grade, I started out doing ten reading centers a week so students could rotate to two centers  every day.  I had some specific problems with that:

1. I never had enough time to prep the ten centers because as a new teacher half the time I was scrambling for my lessons. Center prep was overwhelming and put off until the last minute and sometimes it was Monday morning before I managed to force myself to prep centers.
2. I started with worksheets that I had to check.  Once again it was a time thing.  I didn't have time to check, I didn't check, my students figured it out, and you can guess the end of that story. No checking and we don't care.  Center time was fun time.

Despite those two big problems, I did do a pretty good job of pulling students to my table and working with small groups.  I saw the majority of my class a few times a week. My big regret though was that sometimes I didn't see my higher students as often or at all.

By the end of the year I had grown some new brain cells and cut down to five centers, most of which were self-checking and had multiple steps to keep my kids entertained. This was working better and I felt like my students were accomplishing things. I had made progress and was going to improve the next year.  Then I moved to third grade...

This last year I did both reading and math centers. My third graders weren't very focused in centers and needed lots of redirecting. This time I was smarter and did all self-checking centers and also was more familiar with the games and manipulatives in my classroom.  The five center model from first grade stayed so center prep was much easier this time around.  My big change this year was that towards the end of the year I tried letting them pick their centers. This did not go well for me for a few reasons.

1. It took forever! They couldn't remember what centers they had been to and I had the only record so they were asking where they had been or picking a center they had already chosen.  We did picked centers on the Smartboard so they were dragging and dropping their name, which can be problematic because not all of my kids were good with dragging and dropping.  If they are going to choose this year, I have to revamp how we go about tracking where we have been and I probably won't do it on the Smartboard.
2. The students almost always picked working with the same students most days.  Even though I called randomly they usually still ended up with their friends. While that was ok for management because my kids were happier, I want my students to get used to working with other people.  I need a motivator to get them to pick to work with different people.

I will say the positive of letting them pick was they were more engaged.  When students picked a center, even if it was just the last one that they hadn't done, they were more focused than they had been before.

My major problem this last year wasn't the actual centers, but pulling students to my table.  I didn't have to have students at my table to make my center system work like in first grade.  My bad habit became putting my students in centers and then work on something that I needed to or pull students to my table to complete work from a day they had missed.  I wasn't working with struggling students or expanding work for students as much as I needed to.  I did better in math than I did in reading though.

My goal for the coming year is to do a better job pulling students to my table to work in small groups.  One way I plan on doing that is to change how I do centers. I'm going to try doing 4 centers and a fifth group at my table, that way I have to pull students to make my center system work.  Since my centers are becoming pretty low-prep, I can focus on planning for small group time.  More to come on the Journey to the Centers of the Classroom!