Reading Center Groups

Oh, hello there!  It's been what...a month since I blogged last?  Gee willies.  I'm terrible.

In other news - Reading Centers.  Reading centers are AWESOME!!  But they're a whole ton of work.  Really.  You can find me just about every Sunday night slaving away over laminating and cutting up cutesy little activities for the following week.  But that's not what I'm posting about today.  I'm writing about this:

How I organize my groups for centers.

I learned this from an awesome teacher I student taught with (thanks, Mrs. Lee! :)).  I've seen lots of teachers do this different ways, but this way works BEST for me.  I usually have one student of each reading ability level at each group (green, yellow, and blue).  This way, I call back one color (green for example), and the yellows and blues are working together at centers.

First, this cuts down on chit chat.  Every teacher knows the more students you have in a center, the more talking and misbehaving is going to happen.  Second, this makes sure I (generally) don't have two kids who have no clue what they're doing at a center.  If my low students need help reading directions or completing an activity, they always have a middle or high student there to help them.

It's not always fool proof, but it works for me!

Now, we are doing some AWESOME things in Science this week, so hopefully I'll have something much more interesting to blog about soon!  Thanks for hanging with me!