Planning Center Rotations in Kindergarten

question but i get asked all the time how many students do you have at each group how many rotations do you do what are your best tips for transitioning from one center to another i get a lot of questions about this so i'm going to explain the two systems that have worked for my classrooms in the past and they should work for you i've used them with so many different types of groups of students that i've had different types of schools different times that i've had to do centers and they've both worked so every year it is different and that's okay sometimes halfway through the year you might have to switch it up and that's completely fine as long as you understand the systems of these rotations so the first one is for rotation system and what it means is students go to four centers every day you switch those centers every single day and they get to see you every single day so if you have an hour long walk for centers they would get to do each center for about 12 minutes i would always have a minute for transitioning into the center as well as a minute at the end to clean up so it would be about 12 minutes of them actually sitting down and working now the benefits of this is that you get to see them every single day but it is for a shorter amount of time so it's only for about 12 minutes there's not much you can do in 12 minutes although that is like the perfect amount of time for a lesson so this works best for smaller class sizes i would say like under 24 students is best because if you have more than 24 students that's gonna be more than six in a center group and that's just when it gets really chaotic so definitely a smaller class size and if you have a group that needs a little bit more intervention time this would be good because you are seeing those students consistently every single day so this is what the full rotation system would look like and you can find these planning sheets in my tpt store they have planning sheets for center so literally everything you need you just type it in and it will autofill for you so it automatically goes through the different centers so they might go to a small group that is reading first with me and then maybe they would do technology next uh game and then independent writing they would practice writing sentences so this is just an example of a day so with this system you do have to switch out your centers every single day with the six six group rotation you have six centers for two days so your students would go to three centers per day so on day one group one would go to center number one center number six and center number five so the first three centers and then on tuesday the next day they would go to center four center three center two so it automatically shows you what central numbers that you would need to go to so this would be super helpful to have if you have the six quotations so the benefits of this is that your guided reading lessons are longer but you only see them twice a week so with this system monday tuesday would be the first set of centers and then wednesday thursday would be the next set of centers and i will explain what i do on fridays to do the same thing for both systems on fridays that really helped motivate my students to finish their centers but with the six rotation system this would be best for a larger class if you have more than 20 students i would suggest doing six rotations to keep those groups small you're able to move kids around a little bit more in those groups which is helpful when you might have a student who is not working well with our group instead of only having three other options of groups that they go in you have five other options of groups that they go in so with both these systems i would have what i called fun friday which is really just like a free choice friday so free choice centers so here's how it works if and only if the students finish all of their work for the week they would get to go pick a center i had six centers laid out they had to pick one of each category so there were two technology centers that they could choose from there were two independent centers that they could choose from and then there were two game activities type of centers that they can choose from and i would just pull different centers from [Music] the past week um i would also do sometimes i would have a painting center where they got to paint their sight words or a lego center where they just got to play with legos because sometimes they needed that extra play time so it wasn't always very academic but they were built they were working on fine motor skills working with others working independently they were still working on those important skills but not all of them are practicing like a specific skill sometimes if i noticed that my students were really struggling with a specific skill i would make sure that i would have that center available so they could have that extra practice if the students did not finish their work for the week they would have to sit at their desks and finish their work before they got to choose a fun friday center so on fun friday what i would do is i would have all the students who did not finish their work i would have their work already sitting at their justice for them and everybody would be sitting on the carpet i would say okay if you have work on your desk you need to go back and finish it right now if not you get to pick your first fun friday center i would explain the centers really quickly i usually kept them pretty similar so i didn't have to do too much explaining and i would call the students one by one to take a center quickly and that would take me about two two minutes and the rules were they could not be more than four students at each center it depends on your class size so it might be more for you and your students must think about who is at the center and if it's somebody that they don't really work well with then maybe they should go pick a different center so as long as they hit three of those centers um on the fun friday that's perfect they don't have to finish the center it's just it's more fun and extra practice so i always did that on fridays it was really helpful when i had short weeks because if there was only four days if we had a monday off or friday off i didn't have to worry about trying to move centers around i only planned for that week so what i did during the fun friday centers is i would pull students as needed some weeks i might pull all of my students and work on sight words individually with them some weeks i would maybe grab one group of students and re-practice a skill that they learned in the week that maybe they struggled with maybe i noticed that a group was struggling with handwriting and i pulled a couple kids from different groups to work on their handwriting so i would just kind of pull kids as i needed and that always worked really well for me i tried to see every kid every day did it er every friday but it didn't always work out and that's okay i just tried to make sure i would see them

Channel: Sweet for Kindergarten Kristina Harrill

Views: 784

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: centers management, kindergarten centers, planning centers, center rotations in kindergarten, how to run centers in kindergarten

Id: rWiseUQaG8s

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021