One of my favorite balanced literacy centers is our word work center. I give credit to my co-teacher because she was using playdough as a learning tool in her classroom and I wasn't. Now, I'm not in competition by any stretch - it was just one of those moments where you look at what you're doing and feel the twinge of "I need to improve." It felt a bit like a kick in the pants because I am a firm believer in students being able to manipulate (which kinders think feels like play) to learn literacy and how much more manipulative can you get than playdough?
Two summers ago I was determined to create a word work center that taught students some key things and not just how to play with playdough, which I knew if not carefully constructed, they would default to. So I toiled away...
This center features a poster explaining what their goals and choices are. Each activity has the standards posted next to it (hard to see). The star designates that at this center students have choice as to which activity they'd like to do. (Our class agenda features the star for "choice time" (play time) so the symbol translates well).
This is a sample of the workmat that students use to stamp the sight word and then roll out the letters in playdough to form the word. I change out the sight words every nine weeks to match the ones we're working on. So, the activity never changes, but the materials change which helps keep the center keep from feeling stale.
We have one set of lowercase abc stampers from
Lakeshore. They are great quality and I want my students to focus on lowercase since that's what they'll see most often in print. We have four tupperwares of playdough and a few plastic rolling pins.
This is a sample workmat where students stamp the missing letter from the ABC order. At the beginning of the year I choose only cards that feature the last letter missing, then we move up in difficulty to the middle of the strip is missing to the beginning of the strip is missing.
Students stamp rhyming words (and essentially word families) using the pictures as a clue. I took the photos off of starfall (love that site!) and align when my students use these mats to coincide with when we focus on the matching vowel or vowel pattern.
This is a sample student workmat that students use to form the letters using playdough "snakes." I add black and gray dots to show how many strokes and where to start.
I have to admit, I try to work smart to create centers that will last a long time and differentiate themselves!
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- Leslie
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