How to Save Your Sanity with Centers | PD in Plain English
Can we just have a moment of silence for the end of summer? My husband is back in the classroom full time, leaving me behind, at home with our babies, for the first time in my whole life. I have never NOT gone back to school, y’all. Not since I started Kindergarten. It’s the strangest feeling, but it’s given me this extra time to really reflect on the things that really bugged me out when I went back to school.
The biggest shock to the system is always having soooo many things to do, after having virtually nothing to do. My husband is a middle school teacher, and teaches one subject all day. Now, he is expected to teach that subject very deeply, and he has about 10x the number of students that I do, so it’s no walk in the park for him, but I have a few things that I think are uniquely tough about teaching elementary school. One of them is FOR SURE centers.
You plan this thorough, unannounced observation-ready lesson for reading and math, and then remember that for about an hour of each of those blocks, you will then need 75% of your class to be doing other things, that you also have to plan, differentiate, and teach them how to do them. And “teaching centers” is not a block on our schedules, y’all. Every minute you spend teaching behavior routines with centers is time not spent teaching your content. And we all know those standards keep getting longer and more complex.
I don’t believe in any of this stress. I don’t believe it should exist, nor does it need to. My first few years of teaching, the centers thing really threw me for a loop. I was always changing what my kids were doing, to keep it ‘fresh’ and ‘exciting’, but it was resulting in tons of unfinished work and confusion. And it was killing me. I lived at school on the weekends trying to get things copied and prepped for just one week ahead of me. I decided after year 2 that this was utter nonsense, and I was not going to operate that way anymore.
SO today, I bring you three shifts I made that made things mucchhhh better for me, while not compromising the quality of my instruction even a shred. In fact, I would say I became a better teacher, faster, when I stopped sweating the small stuff like which task cards I was going to make for the kids.
Plan 4-5 Months of Evergreen Centers
Click HERE to see my language arts centers.
If you dabble at all in digital marketing, you may have heard of ‘season’ vs. ‘evergreen’ content. Let’s treat centers the same way. Evergreen centers are centered around skills that are in your scope and sequence that you need the kids to master by the end of the year. Seasonal centers should also be focused around your standards, but the pumpkin clip art is the main star. You can’t recycle seasonal centers. Once winter is gone, you’re not gonna bust out those snowflake addition task cards.
Spend some time at the beginning of the year pulling/printing centers that cover your core topics, but do not center around a holiday. Laminate them, print them on durable paper. Store them in plastic bags so you can easily grab them on a Monday morning and put them out for the kids without much thought. You can CERTAINLY sprinkle in the fun, seasonal things. But by the time you get to the last 2-3 months of school, you’re pretty much just recycling centers that the kids haven’t seen in months, but you don’t have to spend tons of time re-teaching. HUGE headache-saver.
Buy in Bundles-and then Utilize Parent Volunteers
Click HERE to see writing prompt photo bundles.
I can not stress to you enough the blessing that a good parent volunteer is. if you don’t have a teacher workroom with assistants copying things for teachers, chances are good that you have a parent who wants to come in near the beginning of the year and help you.
If you’re a TPT shopper, bundles of centers save you 20% typically over what you would spend if you bought them individually. So you can buy them early in the year (especially in August where there is more than one TPT sale!), print them, and hand them off to someone else so they are prepped and ready for the year! This is a good way to get seasonal things that you know you’re going to want to use year after year!
Prioritize Projects over One-Hit-Wonders
Click HERE to see writing projects!
I have a whole video about this, but as your students start to garner more independence in your room, you should consider moving them away from task cards and worksheets. If there is a quick ending point to that activity, I typically avoid it. I like games that can be played over and over. I like projects with rubrics that kids can chip away at for weeks. I like open-ended writing task cards that can be used multiple times and creative different scenarios each time.
I don’t love a dice game with a worksheet that caps the kids off at 12 problems. The less activities that I have in my room that have a defined ‘ending’, the better. A good card game that the kids can play over and over, and only requires a deck of cards is classroom GOLD. A writing project that the kids can take in any direction they choose…LOVE. Think beyond worksheets and defined tasks when it comes to independent centers. Those things fantastic for small groups where you are pairing the activity with a lesson, and you need it to end quickly. But you will spend more time prepping early finisher activities than you want to if you have those types of things out for the kids to do independently. And instead of early finisher activities, why don’t we all champion for the work the kids are doing to meet their needs and be rigorous, so they aren’t always finishing early?
Alright, I could talk about this for approximately forever, but I’m going to stop myself here. Please email me with questions about centers as you are starting your school year! I love responding to emails, and I may chat about your question on Instagram to help multiple teachers at once!
