We have 5 centers.
- Center 1 - Non-Fiction Text Features Center - Students are looking through various non-fiction books to gind text features like titles/sub-titles, index, highlighted words, maps and diagrams, glossaries, and table of contents. I chose books that were about their current UOI, so 4th graders are looking at atlases and books about explorers, while 5th graders have books about the Civil War and genetics. Students check off these features on an enlarged chart covered in laminating film, making a dry erase mat.
- Center 2 - Bananagrams - Need I say more? A favorite center, definitely. We are talking about how to see words with the letters all jumbled up. They are looking for prefixes and suffixes to make words longer, as well.
- Center 3 - Review Crossword Puzzle - Students are reviewing the skills we learned in our first term. So they are revisiting the organization of the media center, including call numbers, and how to use Destiny Quest effectively.
- Center 4 - Genre Matching Game - There are 3 steps to this game. First, students match genres to the definitions (poetry, biography, autobiography, adventure, historical fiction, realistic fiction, fantasy, science fiction, and humor). Then they categorize them into either fiction or non-fiction. The last step is to take pictures of book covers and match them to their genre. If the students are whizzes at the game and have time, then they brainstorm other book titles and which genre they might fit into. We've also had a few discussions about how books don't fit into just one genre, but how we might categorize one as adventure first, then historical fiction, depending on author intent or plot events.
- Center 5 - World Book Online Scavenger Hunt - Students are using our online world book research tool to find different things on a list. This scavenger hunt is designed to show them the different ways to search this site and the interesting features the site has. One of the items is to find the most popular articles on the website, and our scavenger hunt has definitely affected what is featured in that part of World Book, which is really cool!
We have had a lot of fun with the centers so far! They are designed so students rotate through them over a period of 5 weeks, which is almost a full term for us. That gives me one week to do something else, which is great because if you read my next blog, you will see that we have some exciting events coming up, and we will be doing some awesome activities to prepare!