Changing Centers

sorry I think I'm good hey everybody mr. Greg here from the kindergarten smorgasbord and one of the things I get a lot of questions about is how I run and manage and organize all of my centers or as we call them in our classroom hippopotamuses so I've talked a lot about how we run centers with the center wheel and all of the choices and all of the the freedom that my kids have during Center time so one of the things that people ask a lot about and I haven't really talked much about is how I can doubt my centers so today I wanted to show you how I do that and so the way the centers are designed and created with all of the choices that are built into both math and literacy centers I don't have to change my centers frequently every couple of weeks I'll add in a couple of new centers to keep things fresh but I don't have to do a big center change every Friday actually I can wait and do it at the end of the month or after a holiday so since we just wrapped up with Thanksgiving it's time to switch out to all of our Christmas centers so I'm gonna show you what that looks like you're gonna see it's very quick and easy and again I don't have to spend all Friday night at school counting out centers it's it's a very efficient very quick process and when the kids come back after Thanksgiving break they'll have all new hippopotamuses so the first part of my centers and changing them out and making it easy is having them organized and so this is the closet in my classroom and you can see that all of my centers are organized by skill and I organized by skill so that when I am changing out centers if my kids need to work on beginning sounds I can pop into the closet grab this beginning sounds box and pull out some centers for beginning sounds so I don't have to dig through boxes of February centers to find a beginning skill a beginning sound Center and it makes it super easy because I can just grab the stuff from the tubs throw it in the boxes where it goes and grab out new centers so this is this makes a big difference in being able to change out my centers very quickly because it's very easy to find the skills that I need and it makes putting things away all right so let's get started we're gonna see if Jason can follow me around so what I do what I'm changing out centers is when I'm pulling them out of the tubs I'm gonna start looking for all of the things that go together so that I'm not making a bunch of trips back and forth so right now I'm looking for all of the centers that are just letters and I know that that's all a better recognition because I know none of my other groups are working on letters so the rest of this stuff is all gonna be beginning sounds CVC words and those kinds of skills so I don't need to pull out anything else so now I can take these and I'm gonna throw these back in here and they're gonna go right here and this hub because this is all my letter recognition centers okay so now we can do our beginning sounds and then of course sometimes the kids lose the bags so I always keep extra bags handy so that when I am putting stuff away I can put it back in the bags and it'll be ready to go and I use this bags with there are sliders on top because it makes it a lot easier to the kids open and close you'll notice I'm not taking out every one of the centers I do leave some of these centers that are not holiday themed so like I'm leaving the CVC what does the Fox say beginning sounds I'm leaving those in their tubs because those can be used all year but what you will see me do for example this is just beginning sounds this green group has worked on this one for a while so what I'll do is I'm gonna put it over here in the blue group and so when they come in they'll have a new center to work on even though it's been in all the other tubs so now what I'll do because I'm gonna I want to fill up these two tubs so you can see what that process looks like so you don't have to watch me pull out all of these centers so what I've done this week was I actually sit down and did some quick assessment of my kids using est I we also did our running records this week so I have a really good idea of where all of my kids are right now so I know that none of my kids need to work on just a letter recognition so what I'm gonna be pulling out for my two groups I just emptied those tubs I'm gonna be pulling out all beginning sounds which of course there's a letter recognition involved but they're going to be really focused on beginning sounds the rest of the tubs are going to be beginning sounds and CVC words and word families because that's where I'm seeing my kids need a lot of work and so that's where we're gonna be focused on in our centers so this part can get a little messy just because I have to kind of find what I'm looking for but I also kind of have an idea of what I'm looking for I know I'm looking for all you know Christmas holiday themed stuff also looking for centers that are not necessarily seasonal so there's a good Christmas freebie on the blog so I'm just kind of digging through I also know that I have another box of beginning sound centers so if I don't find what I'm looking for in this box I'll just go grab that other box so there's a Christmas trees and Christmas ornaments some by Christmas and black lines and what ends up happening as I can tell kind of by looking at this boxes I'm kind of digging through it as things get switched out what ends up happening is the boxes kind of naturally end up being divided by almost by like seasons so this is pretty much everything through Thanksgiving put out a couple of Christmas things but there aren't a lot of Christmas items in here and it's just as I switched off out things kind of end up grouped together and I do know that I've thrown some of this beginning sound stuff away because it's been updated so I need to reprint stuff so there's some more beginning sounds from the holidays around the world gingerbread superheroes because they're cute yeah I love those so already I'm starting to see a lot more Christmas stuff so that kind of tells me and winter stuff this is where most of the Christmas and winter stuff is going to be so you don't you don't actually organized by CBC fall CBC winter notice like you said a second ago they just naturally end up yeah kind of together because as you're going in and changing them everything kind of all look together and piled together so it ends up kind of naturally happening on its own so you only organize by skill yeah and then okay reindeer I'm also seeing in here lots of penguins tough lessons winter stuff which will be great for January and like this would be from my what does the Fox say so if I wanted to pull that out I could pull that out at any time of the year just because it's not a team center so how many do you pull how do you know how many you need Wow um I'm generally I pay very close attention to how many I'm empty but sometimes I don't I'm just kind of guessing so what I'm doing so like on even though this is a beginning sound center there's no matching involved it's just writing the letter so I'm gonna put this one in the dream group because I want this group working on the letter and the sound so they're gonna have activities that are actually the picture and the letter so it's a little more challenging because they're they're not looking for the letter they're just writing the letter what about lost pieces how do you know where they go um it kind of depends on what it is and sometimes if I find them I try to put them back I've got a box in here a little basket of lost pieces so I'm kind of keep my like here's a lost piece and so when I do the math centers in a little while I'm gonna be looking for this activity it's hard I don't think there's a great way to keep up with them the kids are pretty good about it if they find it they'll let me know and we try to put it or put it up right away and so I need a few more so I'm gonna go look for a few more of those beginning sound centers also what I can do is I can come over here and look so if this is the what does the Fox say Center and it's beginning sounds so what I will do is I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna do this so kind of what you did I'm gonna get kind of switching some stuff around that this makes it it makes it easy on me it's very easy to kind of switch things around but it also allows the kids to help each other so it doesn't require me to have to explain a lot of the center so if let's take somebody from the green group says I don't know how to do this the kids and these two groups have already done that Center so they can they can help the kids so do the do they pick any center in their color yes so it doesn't matter which drawer they grab from they can drop from any drawer that they want as long if they're in the green group they can pick any of the green or if they're if it's math and they're in the green math group they can pick any of the stuff in the green math basket that's where that freedom and that choice comes in and that's what keeps them engaged and eliminates that behavior and that board and I'm finished so they they have control over what they want to do so they want to do this one that looks fun they can because if I told them to do this one and they didn't want to they're gonna get bored and they're gonna they're probably gonna cause some behavior so that's why we have all the choices and they have all the freedom to pick what they want and to do the activities that they want and because it's all differentiated no matter what drawer they pick it's a skill that they need to work on so I'm really targeting the drawer as to what what those kids in that group so that's what it looks like when I change out centers umm do you put one activity in each drawer yes so there's one activity in each drawer and like some of these almost all of my creations have reporting sheets and with the reporting sheets what I do is I create two to three recording sheets and that's what makes the differentiation easy so this one they're gonna say the sound and color the picture but that also will have where they write the letter so there's some differentiation and you can also would have the letters so they could just work on letter recognition so there all of my centers are designed to be done in the same way so the process stays the same the skill and the clipart changes and with the two to three recording sheets you're not getting just one Center so this would be actually three different centers so they're designed to be very kid-friendly very engaging very teacher friendly very friendly in that you don't have to spend time on Monday teaching new centers because if you're using my centers then they're all pretty much done the same way so the kids are familiar with how they're done but you're also getting multiple centers and multiple activities in one center and easy to differentiate easy to meet the needs of all of your kids so the center's that you're putting in here now are these skills that they're currently working on are they ones that they've previously mastered no their skills that they need to work on and so like this group needs to work on beginning sounds so everything's gonna be in these tubs are gonna be on beginning sounds are probably gonna leave this one out just so they have one to work on letters although I did make a new one that's nicob red means that one out and then over here you can see this group is working on CVC words and so so then they you they change colors based upon their mastery of their skills yeah they the groups fluctuate a little bit but more what changes are the skills more than the kids because what I what I found is that these groups stay pretty pretty consistent you'll see some movement like between these two maybe these two and these two but really the skills in the tubs are what changes and how hidden don't change as often how often do you change your centers out so every couple of weeks what I will do is I'll come over and we'll say we will say every couple weeks I'm finished with this one here and then I'm gonna run in the closet and grab a new one to put in here and then what I would do is I would take some from this group and I would throw them here and then I would find something to put in here so I kind of shift some things down and then this group will get some new stuff but these are all seeing new centers because I just kind of moved the stuff so that keeps it fresh and new every couple of weeks without spending a lot of time and then what I'm doing right now so after a holiday usually is when I come in and I change out all of them and how many students are in a group welcoming four to five depends I'm gonna have 19 kids when we come back so a couple of groups have for a couple have five and so if they want more information on how you do your centers where they go if you want more information on how we run our centers the center wheel they're all the choices all of the creations you can go to the blog I've got several blog posts on how I run centers there's some videos there YouTube videos so you can check out all of those I can give a lot of detail on how we run the center's how the center wheels work there's videos of the kids actually doing the center's there videos of me on the first day of centers and training the kids you can actually see the kids I'm using the centers and here are the center wills information on the vlog and on our YouTube channel about how we run centers how we set them up and manage them lots of videos on YouTube and of course you can go to Teachers Pay Teachers and check out our TV T store and see all the creations that are available and you can also follow us on the Facebook page because we always do lots of Giveaways and we have freebies and lots of freebies on the vlog also so if you have any more questions you can let us know here on Facebook check out the blog for a lot more information on centers check out TPT for all of our Center creations and if you have questions let us know thanks everybody

Channel: Greg Smedley-Warren

Views: 8,557

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: kindergartensmorgasboard, kindergarten, first grade, pre-k, math centers, literacy centers, centers storage

Id: uVa1GeMksCI

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 01 2017