centers in the fourth grade classroom (Sept. 22)

This week at Valley was a 3 day school week because of the Buckwheat Festival. The Buckwheat Festival is a huge event to the people in Preston County. Many of the students are involved in the festival showing animals, school projects and in the parade. I will be attending the Buckwheat Festival on both Wednesday and Friday to enjoy it and see some of the students and their work. Since this week is a 3 day school week, my mentor teacher has decided that instead of starting new stories and information that we would just make it a review week and work on skills the students have not mastered yet, as well as integrate some fun centers. I thought that this was a great idea! I was asked to think of some fun stations that will help the students in areas that they are struggling in so I decided to look on my favorite site that really inspires me, Pinterest! I found a lot of really awesome ideas and created some of my own from the ideas I found. Below are the stations I created for this three day week. 1.) Subject/Predicate Fries: My students were really struggling with subjects and predicates, even after a re-teach so I decided to create a few stations to help them out.I only needed a few supplies to create this subject and predicate fries station. First off, I used yellow popsicle sticks to create the fries. I wrote subjects on some of the fries and predicates on the others. I stopped at Wendy's and asked for 3 Large fry boxes to put the "fries" into. I labeled the 3 boxes, mixed up fries, subject fries, and predicate fries. The idea was for the students to work in small groups and separate the popsicle sticks into the correct boxes. 2.) Shake-n-spell: Several of my students have difficulty with spelling and I have noticed that they are not doing so well on their spelling tests. I wanted to give them a fun way to practice their spelling so I created 2 shake-n-spell tubes. All it took were two sprinkle tubes, pom poms, plastic eyeballs, beads and small laminated spelling words. I simply mixed all of the items into the two tubes and put the cap on them. I then created a worksheet that went along with the tubes. The worksheet asked for the students to shake the tube, find a word, read it and write it in the first square. In the second square students were to rewrite the word and underline the vowels. The third square asked the students to rewrite the word in rainbow write. 3.) Subject Predicate Puzzle: As I said earlier my students really do not understand subjects and predicates so I thought of this classroom activity where students each get a laminated puzzle piece that either says subject or predicate. Each student must write what their puzzle piece is asking for with a dry erase marker. After students write on their puzzle piece I will start music. THey will walk around the room until music stops. Once it stops they must find someone next to them who has a match to the piece they have. Then they read their sentence they created to the whole class and we can discuss whether they created a complete sentence that has both a subject and predicate in it. I created a few other stations but I think these three will be my favorite =) Guess I will have to see what the kids think!