One of my back to school goals is to get some fresh, new centers ready for my third graders. I have always enjoyed centers that you can leave out for many many weeks without the kids getting bored. Matching games are something that my kids have always enjoyed, and once you teach how to play the game, you can change out the skills and topics very easily.
When we go back to school, we all know you can’t just jump into centers. You have to teach procedures first with lots and lots of modeling. I always start teaching centers with easy activities or games that everyone can understand. That way they aren’t focusing as much on learning how to do the activity, but learning how to go to centers, how to work with others, how to clean up, how to rotate, and so on. This took my first graders a good month of practice before I gave them challenging activities. I am hoping my third graders will catch on a little faster, but I don’t see any reason to rush this at the beginning of the year.
On my to-do list is to come up with those easy, “everyone understands how to do it” activities that I can use while I teach through my center procedures. However, instead of using linking cubes, coloring, and puzzles (like I got away with in first grade) I would like to try some review skills and centers that they have guaranteed been exposed to before (matching games, memory, word searches, magnetic letters, etc...) That way we can start right away with learning centers to be task-oriented and not just “play time”.
My first back to school review center is focused on vocabulary that we use in Reader’s Workshop. At my district, we have only been using Reader’s Workshop for 2 years now. I went ahead and used it my first year because that was what I was comfortable with out of student teaching. So the majority of my new class will have had Reader’s Workshop vocabulary since first grade. I think the majority will recognize these words that I have put in the matching game, but will have to stop and think to remember their definition. It will probably take a few rounds of playing this game to fully recall all of the definitions and get 100%. Why not use this time to review? It’s better than taking up our precious time throughout the rest of the day!
Grab a copy of my new Reader’s Workshop Vocabulary Matching Center at my TpT store!
Enjoy!
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