Center Time and Stations
Hi there! Have you heard your child’s teacher talk about Center Time and Stations? What are these and what’s the difference? Most importantly, how can you create these at home to keep your kids engaged and learning? Keep reading to learn about this awesome trick great teachers use for keeping kids happily learning daily!
About Center Time: During Center Time a teacher may set up different areas of the classroom to have learning activities at. For example, One center may have tools for building sentences. A second center area may have phonics games, and a third center area may have a writing area with a writing activity. A nice quick writing activity could be to write a letter to a friend teaching or telling them about something related to a lesson.
The important thing for Center Time is to make it related to one learning block such as either all literacy or English Language Arts, or all math. Math can have a center area for variations of the following: addition, subtraction, and multiplication or division. These math areas would have tools for counting such as counting cubes and other manipulatives, as well as paper, pencils and math word problems on short strips of paper. Students should also be encouraged to draw pictures to work their math out.
Centers should have crayons, pencils, paper, and guides that will help them be successful at the tasks you have asked them to do. Centers are easy to recreate at home. Usually a teacher will have time-bound Center Time during guided reading time. While a teacher is working with one student on reading tests, running records or with a guided reading group, centers and stations are how students stay busy so teachers can focus on one or a handful of children, but Center Time can also work brilliantly for those parents working from home who need to keep school-age children constructively busy in between classes.
About Stations: Stations have different themes. For example, for a 4th grade class I have had stations with American history topics. One station would have Civil War photographs, while another station might have Minute Men stories, at the Minute Man station students might be asked to pretend they are a minute-man and write a diary entry of a day in the life of a Minute Man. Another station might have vocabulary used during the Civil War period and the last station might have information about the key players during the Civil War and the role they played in history, such as Abraham Lincoln.
A vocabulary station can ask students to write sentences using vocabulary from the Civil War era that would help them to write a diary entry as a Minute Man. The photographs they would have seen at a different station gets the juices flowing for some great writing. One other station I really love is the recording station. This station may have a reading or audio from a specific time period that students can listen to using a headset.
It’s important that the stations are aligned so that each time the students rotate and move to the next station, they are using the information from the last station to feed the learning at the next station. For centers, it doesn’t really matter how the centers are arranged as long as it is during one block and all the centers are either literacy or math related. To show what students have completed you can have a bin at each station or center for students to put their finished work in.
Below are some links to help with setting up home centers and stations, or your classroom if you choose!
Digital Timer in pastel colors
Traffic Light Timer for kid’s desk
Writing Paper with Space for Drawing Pictures
15 x 11 x 3.5 in. paper organizer bins
I hope these tips and tools have been helpful. With lots of love for your little one’s learning, Lexx