FEELING SUCCESSFUL! Starting Centers (Routines, Tips, + Explanations) Vlog #4

[Music] good morning sweet friend welcome back to my channel my name is maylene call from mrs calls campers this is vlog number four so if you haven't seen the last three vlogs make sure you go back and watch them using the playlist i am a k1 combo teacher so i'm teaching kindergarten and first grade this year and it's gonna be a really busy morning it is tuesday because it is the day after labor day we had labor day off um so i'm dubbing today cookie butter tuesday normally we have cookie butter monday today it's cookie butter tuesday i did so much this weekend excuse me came here over the weekend which normally i would say please don't do it but if it's gonna make you feel a little bit better especially at the beginning of the year do what you need to do let me show you everything i did i did so much and i still have so much to do this morning it is 7-eleven here's my little to-do list i lifted up just so you guys could see but i needed to charge my little voice level light that i keep up there i needed to charge my microphone and i did that i needed to charge my tablets which hopefully they're charged i don't know when i left i wasn't sure if they were completely dead or what i hung up some fairy lights you can't see them now um i have them plugged in to a smart plug over here so i'm gonna program that so it'll just turn on automatically for me i cleared off my back table way over there cleared it off i also hung up my ela anchor charts i've been kind of introducing these concepts and i figured it was time that i just put them up so i'm using magnetic curtain rods for most of them and then i ran out but i had those magnetic hooks you know the little strong magnetic hooks and then just binder rings so those are up and ready we refer to those all year long and i also have my addition and subtraction one up and i prepped my anchor chart for this week this is going to be our read-aloud the very last leaf i didn't get the all our welcome banners done but hopefully my aide can help me with that i started getting my guided reading binder ready i hung up my pocket chart in my library that is over there and we're going to be doing book club which i will talk to you about soon i organized my writing center i organized my small group carts and i printed my schedule i do need to laminate it um hopefully that gets done today so this is the writing center not this i left this out i went ahead and hung up all the kind of basic parts to it i do need to hang string and hang our september cards this resource is from move mountains in kindergarten so i'm going to hang up the september cards and then i decided since i had a two-sided bookshelf i would put mostly the k things on this side and put mostly the first grade things on this side so they would know which side to pull from i'm gonna put this away i also took down my b leader not a boss anchor chart that was on this window because i want to hang other anchor charts over there kind of made it toward part of my calm corner and i also put led lights back there and i thought that would be nice because this corner is really dark and i can't put a lamp there so love that i'll link these for my amazon for you literally the cheapest ones it came with so much i had to cut it but that's why i got them because they were the cheapest ones so i'm going to be working on this this week to show you and then i got this um kind of prepped for my aid my kindergartners do a new poem every week my first graders do a new poem every two weeks so i just wrote out um the kinder poem for this week i'm going to add probably a little bit more as the week goes on mostly to this one that she can help me with because she's super fast but in case you're curious what i am asking her to do and then this is the poem that i need to copy for my kinders this morning and all the stuff that i'm asking her to do i just put in this little bin um also my lunch for today is just some breakfast burritos that i made i use these um they're like car balance tortillas they're like 70 calories so bacon egg and cheese breakfast burritos and i almost skipped this and i was like you know what if i don't have five minutes yeah i just needed to do that i also brought some bananas and some cheese sticks i did go to walmart over the weekend i picked up just a couple of things first thing is some toothpicks i really want to start doing um like pin prick art where they have like you'll see i'll talk about it later but the resource i'm using is from the pond and you put a piece of paper with a printed design on top of a piece of like card stock paper or like colored paper and they just poke at it and make like a little design and it's really good for fine motors so i thought it'd be good for my fine motor bins or it's just a different activity i got a ton of sheet protectors because i want to make a little like intervention binder i got some mini clothes pins for my writing center so i can hang those word cards i got some fasteners so i can make like little spinners with my kids i got some rubber bands so we can do those um like geo boards with the pegs you know and the rubber bands i don't know what they're called but i needed rubber bands gum and then over the weekend i got his prize package from kaelyn she sent me this book apples which is great because we're going to be starting a little apples unit soon i love these nat geo books she also sent goodbye winter hello spring and i have goodbye summer hello fall that we will probably be reading this week i love these books and then i love this little book series um and this one is the squirrels who squabbled the cutest little story and it has those i don't know what they're called i'm just gonna call them like dynamic pages illustrations are wonderful if you're familiar with the koala who could but just so much fun and then this weekend at home i printed about a thousand things i edited our schedule just a little bit so i can talk with you about that later but i printed off more schedule copies i printed off my guided reading schedule which i can't show you because it has names all over it but i can talk to you about it later and i printed off all of my schedule cards except this time i did something a little different and i added pictures just so it kind of helps them so i need to eliminate these i'm going to use my personal laminator because it is just a little bit better than like the school lamination and then i was talking to you guys last week about the fix-it sentences and it being a little bit too hard for like 95 percent of my first graders so i went back to just a primary girls resource and i printed her pre-primer sentences so basically i need to laminate them again i'll use my personal eliminator these are going to be a little bit easier because they only have four cards per set so here's set five and there's only four little chameleons for this so that's gonna be one sentence and when you flip it over i think i might have copied oh oh well um here's the sentence here is my hat they know capital letter gross first punctuation goes at the end she put a little three so they would know the third word so it was a little bit more differentiated so it's basically all given to them and they just need to practice building the sentence seeing what that looks like and then writing it so i did all of those and then i also from just a primary girl i printed her magnetic letter name tags and i can't i really can't show you these because they have kids names and faces but i'll put an example right here and then finally i printed some fine motor bin labels i want to start that this week um printed the rest of my writing center because i only had half of it i printed a record keeper this is gonna be for my guided reading binder and this is from my planner resource page pack so if you want this cute little record keeper you can get it there and then i printed this little sign to go in the library i'm gonna cut it up and put it on card stock i literally have so much to do and then this is going to be my calm corner resource i'll give you a little preview but i'll show you whenever i put that up and i made these cute little cards to go with it so i do need to eliminate like a hundred million things but before i do that i'm just going to make sure everything is ready for my kids i'm gonna try to prep their center folders and i'm gonna run off copies for their poems i don't think i'll have time to laminate this morning like i wanted to but you know what that's okay it's the end of the day today was a really great day i felt super super successful everything went exactly like i planned i modified our schedule just a little bit so when we first started i had decided that i would pull first grade reading groups and then kindergarteners would be in the centers and then i remembered that that's not the way i like to run my groups last year if you watched my vlogs things were a little bit different because of covid but this year i'm going back to how i like to do my reading groups i'll explain that to you in just a second first of all they came in they did their stemmins again i don't have my fine motor bins ready just yet but hopefully that'll be something that we can do soon i'm just waiting on a couple of things that are in the office we did our morning song we did our alphabet song we did our morning meeting that was great and then we went into our read-aloud for today which was the very last leaf so i am teaching a combo class which means there are parts of our day that we do together and there are parts of our day that we do separate one of the very first things we do in the morning is our read aloud as an entire class so i have kindergartners and first graders on the carpet and today we were doing the very last leaf this book it was the first time i actually read it with a class and we did primary scouts activity beginning middle end we also talked about characters and settings and all of the little read-aloud things that i talked about with you guys in my last vlog talking about parts of the book the cover title page making predictions stopping and trying to figure out vocabulary all of those things we do every time we do a book this one was a little bit harder for them to retell but i had a lot of students come up today and practice that so day one of our read-a-lot we read the book we retell it together using these picture cards and then i have students come up and retell it and they did a beautiful job with that also during our read-aloud the students are on the carpet they're on their learning leaves which are assigned spots that i give the students mostly based on behavior to help them focus during a read aloud sometimes i let them sit wherever they want a lot of times they're sitting on their learning leaves right above them i have these anchor charts that i showed you this morning and we went over characters and a setting today so i referred to both of those they thought these were really cool they noticed them as soon as they came in this morning so the read-aloud went great i'm interrupting myself really quickly because i also totally forgot to say we're going to be talking about seasons and fall and weather so i did introduce the concept of fall and autumn we talked about it a little bit and i just totally forgot to say that a second ago when i was explaining to you what we did with this book but we are starting seasons and weather and all that so i did i did mention it and i did want to bring it up after our group read aloud as a class they go to recess and then when they come back i work with first graders for their literacy this week we are doing character traits so i pulled out main gene the rhesus queen i love the book the recess queen and none of my first graders had read it before which is also really nice um and then we just did this very basic anchor chart like very very basic not the most pretty anchor chart but hey it works so we talked about character traits and then we talked about how you can look for clues in your book based on what the character looks like what the character acts like and then what they say so for recess queen we talked about in the beginning um jean was mean she was a bully she was bossy she was angry and then we talked about katie sue came in the middle and she was cute excited nice and considerate and i got to pull in one of our secret stories so after we read this book and we were talking about katie sue's character traits they were talking about how she was thinking about me jean and i was like yeah we actually have a word for that we call that considerate and i asked if they had ever heard the word before and kind of had a little conversation about what it means to be considerate when you're thinking of others and i don't spell with them every single word that i write on the anchor chart only every now and then otherwise it would take absolutely forever but this is a new word and i really wanted to nail in there so the first thing we did was we clapped at the syllables consider it and then we started sounding it out so we got c-o-n-s-i-d and then we got to the er part and you can see there's a little it's hard to tell it's a little car under there when we got to the er sound i made a big deal about wanting to share another secret with them so i used kitty gardner's secret stories and she has all the secrets in here and they're hanging on our back wall over there so i made a really big deal i was like i have a secret to tell you about these two letters i can't even remember exactly what i said but i just took my laser pointer and i pointed it back at the back wall it does reach the back wall i know you can't see it on the camera and i pointed to the er ir poster and i said what do you notice about all of these letters and they said that they're in cars and i was like yes have you ever been in a car before and someone had to slam on the brakes because they were going too fast in the car and went and they were like yeah and then a couple of them were telling me about a story about they heard someone outside of their house get into a crash and they heard because they were slamming on their brakes and i was like yes er ir and you are are really bad drivers they are terrible drivers the worst drivers and anytime they get in the car together they go because they slam on their brakes and they loved practicing the sound and this is just a sneak peek at how awesome these stories are this was one thing i was really excited to bring into my classroom this year and so i had them spell the sound again er and then we went through and spelled considerate together but just a little peek into our secret story i'm sure i'm gonna be sharing little tidbits all year long but it really drove it home and so i'm actually gonna be looking for another word that has that spelling pattern in it tomorrow to see if i can you know jog their memories a little bit but they did a really awesome job with it and they loved it and then in the end we talked about how mean jean was happy excited just like katie sue was nice and friendly so while i'm doing literacy with my first graders my kindergartners are actually in the library with my aide and they are working on poetry and phonemic awareness i use hegerty for phonemic awareness and my aide actually does that most of the time with them because it's something that they really really need and their poem this week is apple happy and then when i finished with first grade i had all my kindergartners come to the carpet and sit on the very edge and i hyped this up i looked like a crazy person actually so first thing they're all sitting right here on the edge of the carpet and i took my laser pointer and i pointed up at our little alphabet letters up there and i was like today we are going to be learning about and i pointed to all of those and i was like what are those called again they said letters and i said yes and in this box i have a mystery letter a secret letter i don't think you're ready for it and i made a really big deal and i was like no i don't i don't think i should show you i don't think i can and i had a couple of students come up and just peek inside and then i closed it really quickly i said are you ready to see what is in my mystery box a new letter today and i pulled them out very slowly one at a time and every time i pulled it out i asked them what it was so for example monster so we said monster and then i had them say monster so for each one we pulled it out milk milk muffin muffin mermaid mermaid so we did that the whole way through these little alphabet cards are from tara west i have her alphabet curriculum and it comes with it so that was really helpful and then after all that we went through when we said the sounds again and i gave each of them it just worked out that i had a picture for each of them today i gave each of them a card to hold and i asked them what their picture was and they would tell me mermaid and i would say what's the first sound and they would say um they were all able to do that really successful so that was exciting and i was like what do you think our mystery letter today is and a couple of them said m which is really good so then on my powerpoint mystery letter today is and i had them give me a little drum roll and i said what's the letter and they said m and then we went through and i told them that they were going to be detectives and they had to find the letter m and they all did that was great even one of my kids who struggles with letter discrimination he was able to find some so they literally just came up to the board took turns circling the letter m and then we went into our anchor chart which not very fancy the letter m and then i said your turn the letter m they said it with me my turn m is four they said m is four and i had them all raise their hand give me words that started with m a lot of them chose the picture cards that we just used which is perfectly fine so we emphasized the first letter muffin so here is our not fancy anchor chart but i love it and it was super helpful then we went into centers for the very first time i'm going to do pop-ups on screen so you can see what i'm talking about because i can't show you right now because i have students names and faces so it'll be easier to do it in post but i have a very specific way i like to run my reading centers it's just what works for me by no means am i saying this is the way that everyone needs to do it because it certainly will not work for everyone what i do is i have center groups and my center groups are mostly based on behavior and they are mixed levels and i do this for a couple of reasons number one i don't want all the students who are super super talkative in one group and all the students who are super super shy in another group so i mix it up i mix up the leaders with those that need a couple more reminders and the next factor in this equation is their abilities i have mixed abilities in my center groups because i want them working on different things if i have all of my students who are at the highest reading level in my writing center and they're all working on the same thing number one they are going to talk more number two they're gonna be more focused on how others are completing the work i really want them to be independent and doing their own thing in the center and also my students who are a little bit higher can help students who might need extra help with whatever they're working on so there's a lot of benefits to having mixed ability groups in your physical center so my center groups are fiddle leaf willow sycamore and sequoia i have four center groups and i have four centers around the room i have word work i have writing i have computers which i didn't have computers today so they had tablets that's okay and then i have library so i have four center groups and i have four centers and each day each center group only goes to one center they're just doing one center that day and the reason is because they have work that they must get done in their center if they are in word work or in writing library computers they don't have to do their center folder that day but if they're in word work or writing they need to do their center folder work so i want to give them time to do their center folder work and then have choices during the center so my students visit one center a day again this is just what works for me and while my students are in centers i'm calling my guided reading groups and my guided reading groups are based on abilities but my students have no idea who is in what group because i don't call the circles to my back table or the pineapples to my back table i call their names and they sit in the order that i call them so if i call john marie lisa and jeffrey they're gonna sit exactly where i point can choose where they're sitting and kind of control behaviors that way too but it also works out because when i'm pulling my students back here i'm not pulling one complete center away if that makes sense so i'm pulling some kids from library and some kids from word work and some kids from computer and some kids from writing hopefully that makes sense so that's kind of the gist on how i run my centers so if that doesn't make sense i can do another video kind of explaining it to you more in depth but today it was our very first day actually being in our centers doing what we were supposed to be doing so here's how i did it number one i taught them their group names so fiddle leafs willows sycamore sequoias i had them all stand up sit down stand up sit down and then i showed them where in the room their centers are my powerpoint has pictures of the center there too so that is helpful and then i also told them look around at your group these are your people if you're ever not sure where to go look for your group these are your people and then i had them practice walking to the center they would be at that day everyone came back to the carpet and then everyone went to their center again and then i went to each individual center and talked to them about what i needed them to do so my center folder friends i explained to them when you come to writing you're gonna have to do your center folder first this visual in here and really they just did their center folders and then a brain builder today we didn't have a ton of time after that friends who are on the tablet i explained to them to keep their voice levels down my friends are in the library i walk them through how we handle books we get the book bins out with two hands we pick one book we look at a book we can read with a little book buddy which is a little stuffed animal and then we put the book back where it goes and we use two hands and we put it back on the shelf and then we get a different book my library center is super close to my word work center so here's library and literally right here is word work so they could honestly be sitting right there and so i made sure to talk with my friends in library and i was like friends in library if we are being loud can my friends in wordwork concentrate and get their work done and they were like no and then i came over to my word reference and i was like friends if we are loud over here can my friends in the library concentrate on their book and they were like no so i think they got it um and my word work friends today just worked on um my kinders did an alphabet bootcamp practice and my first graders did i can show you actually here's an example of something my first graders had to do they had to sound out the word and then find the picture that matched it and she didn't color it but they were supposed to color it cut it and glue it and then when they were done i let them use our little cbc um toolbox just to practice building some cbc words this was sent to us off our wish list so that is very exciting but it looks like this and they have these little pieces that they connect together they were supposed to sound out log build it and then check it on the back and i think they were really successful with that my kindergartner didn't actually finish her work because she had a little bit of name practice in there too but her option was going to be this alphabet puzzle and i didn't necessarily want to like overwhelm them with too many choices so my friends who were in writing my first graders were just working on basic like cbc writing and then when they were done i had them practice with these and that is from tarawest and my kindergartners literally just did a letter handwriting page and when they were done i let them practice with these and they thought these little magnetic pen boards were the coolest thing ever so this entire time that we were doing centers for the first time i would take some time walk around the room make sure students were doing what they were supposed to be doing talking with them about what they were working on what they could do when they were done the first chunk of our centers is a 30 minute time period keep in mind about 15 minutes of that today was literally just practicing and figuring out where to go and what to do when you get there but that's our first chunk of centers and then we go to lunch so i tell them that we're literally pausing our centers and we will come back to them and then when we get back from lunch it is just 20 more minutes of center so i can pull two kindergarten groups for like 10 minutes each so the first chunk of our centers i'm trying to pull two first grade groups and then the second chunk of our centers i'm trying to pull two kindergarten groups but since today was the first day we were actually doing it i pulled a group just for a very short period of time and then i would go around talk to the students ask them what they were doing and just make sure that they were on task make sure they knew what they were doing and just working the whole time and then at the end it went around and i said when you hear the music you're going to clean up your center put everything back where it goes put your work in your center folder and give me a nice line by my table so i can check it and i play the music [Music] my cleanup song has always been fireflies and i don't know why fireflies by owl city is just my cleanup song so that's what i do so they cleaned up and one of my friends was like this music is actually really nice and i was like thank you but they did it they cleaned up i had to go back for a couple of them and show them where a couple of things were supposed to go but that was okay they lined up over here i date stamped their paper and then i checked them off on my center tracker which i can't show you but i'll insert a picture right here of what it looks like that's how i introduced full on centers for the very first time we have been doing centers but it's not at all been like how it was supposed to be like today today was really the first time they truly were in their centers doing center work word work writing library computers all for the very first time after that we went into calendar and then we went into our math block so i have kindergarteners up first for whole group math and i just wanted to share this with you because they thought it was super cute but we started off by counting we did a little um jack hartman just counting to 10 because i really didn't know where my kindergartners were at just yet and i just wanted to get a solid count to 10 because i remember even last year in kindergarten i had some friends at the end granted they were english language learners but could not even count to five this group they can all count to ten i'm pretty sure i think a couple of them get stuck on one or two numbers but i'm pretty sure they can all count to ten this is what i did and they thought it was the most adorable thing ever i went and grabbed this little cat from the library and this again it's one of those things that was just totally like on the spot because i wanted to make it more fun so i brought all the kindergartners to the carpet and we sat in a circle my first graders were doing math centers and i was like this is our counting cat and they thought it was the most adorable thing ever and i was like we're all going to count but you can only talk if you have the counting cat so i'll start and i said one and then i passed it to the person next to me person next to me said two and they passed it three and we just did ten and then we started at one we went to ten started at one went to ten a couple of different times they actually loved it and at the very end okay give counting cat a little pet and say good job and they all pet counting cat and then we put captain cat away and then we did a positions um jack hartman so it's like this a video that's called animals on the farm or something like that and he goes through a bunch of different positions my kindergartners are pretty solid with their positions then we brought out our little cat again and we talked about different positions where the cat was they got it it was great reinforcing some concepts that they already knew after whole group math with the kindergartners i got the first graders so you can see my day is very minute to minute but that's okay because we're getting in the flow and i did i'm not gonna lie i felt a tiny bit rushed today but that's because i was a tiny bit rushed because we're still learning every routine for every time of the day and it's helpful now that we have a bit more of our class because we can actually do things but yeah so i felt a tiny bit rushed but today was still a great day my kindergartners went off with my wonderful aid and they did their math adventure which is just their little math packet that comes straight from their workbook and then the first graders worked with me and we worked on math strategies so we talked about how there's different ways to get the same answer to a problem and my kids really really struggle with using a number line so i kind of pushed heavy on the number line today and had them practice it and one of my favorite things to do is called our oh yeah i was messing with my powerpoint a second ago so it's not pulled up but let me pull it up for you so you can see so my oh yeah it's kind of like a little exit ticket and this was the first time again that i've ever done it with them today but i really like it because it allows students to evaluate kind of where they're at and it lets me see where the class is at a whole and it also is a good chance for them to try something and make mistakes if they need to because i do not have them put their names on it so let me show you this is our hmm oh yeah which you can see they all put it on the oh yeah side so i mean that's great we're coming in we're coming in confident i told them that they needed to write three plus two on their sticky notes and i had drawn this part of the number line on their little post-it note you can see right here in pen is what i drew i had them write three plus two equals five so i drew the black number line on there and i wanted to see if they could label the number line honestly i went around to half of them and labeled it for them anyway because they were taking so long um because then after this was free choice and i really wanted to make sure they got all their free choice time that's the only reason why um so basically i had them do three plus two equals five and i wanted to see if they could use the number line to solve and you can see some of my friends just put the answer all got the answer but they didn't all show me the number line so this tells me that i need to again focus more number lines which i kind of expected but i really just wanted to get them into the routine of this yeah this is also in my powerpoint kit that you can find on my tbt so that was pretty much our whole day i did have a lunch bunch today and i totally spaced because normally my student of the week i let them pick two friends and come to lunch bunch but i totally forgot so i gave my past student weeks a chance to come eat lunch in here with me today and then i had a friend use her lunch bunch coupon and she picked two friends so there were a lot of kids in here today for our little lunch bunch and they loved it but overall it was just a really fun day and things felt super normal to me and i'm just so excited for all the progress that we're gonna make this year and i can see that they're gonna do really well with these routines because they already are and i am still really loving teaching kindergarten and first grade i really really am and i feel super prepared to teach both of them so it's all working out last thing i want to do is show you what my plans ended up looking like for this week because i planned with you a little bit last week they look very different i'm still kind of finding my groove with planning for kindergarten and first grade at the same time but i really like how everything came out this week so i'm going to show you really quickly if you have a question let me know i'll try to do a dedicated plan with me maybe this week let me know if you want to see that here's what my plans kind of ended up looking like for this week so again we don't have any school we didn't have any school on monday and then at the very top i keep our read aloud so we did the very last leaf we reached held it as a class here's what i did with first grade here's what i did with kindergarten and then here is what i did for my small groups and i did color code these just so it was easier for my age but it actually ended up being a little bit easier for me so that's great and then for math with my kindergartners and math for my first grader so that's kind of how it's laid out and this is what this is what the plans look like so you can get a little peek at how it turned out um i did end up getting most of that done which is good i just have to laminate a bunch of stuff but yeah i thought it'd just be helpful to show you so let me know if you want to see a full plan with me this week yeah if you have any questions about anything that i mentioned today please let me know and i can make a longer video and kind of explain to you how i'm doing it again this is just the way that i found works for me it's probably not going to work for every class and it's definitely not gonna work for every teacher but we had a really great day today that being said i am gonna keep this more a shorter daily vlog i really wanna keep all the information in this vlog just to itself so you can come back and refer to it super super easily let me know if you prefer week in my life day in my life lifestyle content mixed in i don't know leave me a comment let me know make sure you like this video so other teachers can see it make sure you subscribe so you don't miss future videos and i will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Mrs. Call's Campers

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Id: RMAMvwI3u58

Length: 31min 22sec (1882 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021