Hey, teacher! 👩‍🏫 Are you constantly spinning your wheels trying to figure out what to put in your literacy centers each week for your 3rd/4th graders? Do you think that literacy centers even have a purpose in the upper grades? Buckle up, teacher friends. This one's long.

For me personally, center time is nonnegotiable. I HAVE to pull my small groups each week. They deserve that structured time just for them -- and not to mention how much learning can be smooshed in that small amount of time!

I get it, though-- logistically it's a lot. But it doesn't have to be! Today I'm going to share how I keep my centers super simple so that I can meet with my groups each week.

First - the basics. Obviously you will need to spend some time getting to know where your students are academically speaking. We use MAP test data, we talk with their 2nd grade teachers, and we use this assessment to figure out how they're doing with foundational skills. (This assessment is multi-faceted, so if they score low on the encoding portion, we can back up and assess them on foundational skills to see where they are needing the most help.)

Once I have a clear picture, I put them into groups. Below is the chart that I use for my rotation. It's simple enough that if I need to move students around, I can. (You can click to make a copy of this version of my rotation chart.)

Then -- what do I put in my centers? Well, I keep it as simple as possible. I have found that if I'm spending hours each week trying to find and prep different activities for every single center, I get overwhelmed and my small group instruction starts to be the last thing I plan, which is completely the wrong idea.

We have FOUR groups. Usually I have 4-6 kids in each group. (No more than 6.) So therefore, I need FOUR stations (we do centers Monday-Thursday, one per day)... And one of those stations is me (small group), so I am already down to planning just three stations.

Before my students start on their station, they complete a section from our weekly spiral review. I usually have them bring this to small group so I can see how they're doing and clear up and misconceptions. It's a great way to keep them fresh on all of the skills we learn as the year moves on.

The first station is IXL review. IXL is a beautiful thing. We used it for math last year and I demoed the ELA portion the last part of the school year and we loved it. It's adaptive for each student, so once they complete the diagnostic, it has them work on skills just for them. It's GREAT. I can also assign quizzes and use all of the data to get small group lesson ideas!

So now I'm down to planning just TWO centers. The next station is our Grammar station. Whatever grammar we are learning for each week is what I put in that center. I have plenty of activities to choose from using our reading program's resources (we use iReady Magnetic Reading).

Finally, the Word Study station. I love this one. I rotate the activities so that students don't get bored. Sometimes I will have my Morphology Task Cards (the digital version -- assigned in Google Classroom to save my sanity).

Other times, students will read one of my Morphology Science/Social Studies Passages.

Or maybe I will add in a fun Morphology Word Search or a Word Sort.

These activities are VERY low prep, easy for me to access and keep up with and not a whole lot to grade. I especially love the digital task cards. Could not be any easier! I usually add concepts that we have learned in past weeks and not necessarily what we are learning in the current week. This way, students get some more spiral review in and typically feel pretty confident completing the activity since we had lots of class time with it prior to them working on the center.

Did someone say early finishers? I have that covered, too. MOST of the time, my students do not finish early. But we all know there's always that one kid. So I do have early finisher activities but again - they are SIMPLE and really mostly stay the same all year. We have a binder full of really cute book projects. They love doing these! The best part is that they're self-explanatory and I set the binder up once and it's done. I sometimes will need to replenish the copies, but that's easy. I have a few other things set up, but this email is long enough for now, so perhaps I will do an early-finisher follow-up. 😉

The important thing for me to remember is to make this part as simple and as manageable as possible. If you just want to have your students read a book if they finish early, and that works for your class -- go for it! Reading is always an early finisher option in my classroom, too.

Whoa -- this one was a BIG one. Happy to answer any questions you have about how I run my centers!

Thank you for being here!