This Week's Learning Stations

We began these stations on Wednesday of this past week.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have found it to be convenient to start stations in the middle of the week because we don't feel the need to stay late on Friday getting everything set up.  This also works well when we have a short week - as long as the stations are rotated in order everyone gets a chance to visit each one.

The yellow station cards are rotated down one pocket each day.  When "Mrs. Phillips" gets back to the top, it's time for a new round of stations.  (This picture is from last year.  I am so happy that I took the time to cover my focus wall entirely in fabric - it looks so much nicer!)

Writing Station.  Students copy the sentence frames onto their papers to write a rebus story.  This masterpiece is my sample - so far no one has copied it!  :-)  Here is the worksheet for the story.

Word Work Station.  Students sort picture cards by initial sounds.

 

 The little boat pictures came from this book.

After sorting their boats, they sorted pictures on this page.  The theme of this unit of reading is transportation, so these activities fit in nicely!

Mrs. S.'s Station.  Students sort picture/word cards into categories.  They practice using picture clues to help figure out the words with this page I found at www.tlsbooks.com

My Station.  The kinders practice counting objects with these cute picnic work mats and *creepy* ants.  As they work, I ask them questions such as which food has the most ants?  Does the sandwich have more or fewer ants than the hotdog?  The kids like playing with these creepy crawlies, and I am able to get a quick look at their understanding of greater/fewer, one more/one less, etc.

After the fun of counting the ants, they are asked to write a number and draw that many ants.  The back of this page (not shown) has a skip counting activity - place ten ants in a number of circles and count by tens.  This worksheet seems super simple, but it was a nice tool to use for differentiated practice.

 

Listening Station.  I made copies of this page for each of our book/CD combos.  The kids complete one after listening to the story.  As the year progresses, I ask them to write some words or sentences in addition to drawing a picture.

I got the form shown above from this book.