I absolutely love using math centers in my math class. Students always enter the classroom in different areas of their learning, so I find it works best to build upon prior knowledge by teaching in small groups. My math period is about an hour long, so how does it look? The first ten to fifteen minutes of class is spent teaching the entire class our new material. Following the large group lesson, the rest of our time is spent rotating through stations. One of those stations is always small group work with the teacher.
Pulling small groups daily, allows me to be constantly accessing student knowledge and teaching to fill gaps in the students learning. I am often switching up the groups to place students with peers that they work well with, who can assist with their learning, and also that may have some of the same questions. Students love rotating through math centers as it gets them out of their seat, gives them time to interact and work with their classmates, and includes many engaging activities.
Over the past two years, I have found many great activities for students to work on during these stations. Let's take a look at a few of my favorite stations.
1. Teacher Time
Teacher Time is what I call our small group time. This is when students meet with me in small groups to continue working on our lesson, work on a enrichment lesson, or review confusing concepts. During Teacher Time we most commonly work through worksheets as a group or solve problems on a white board. This is also a great time to collect student data.
2. Tech Time
Tech Time is a student favorite in my classroom. During this time I allow students to individually get on a Chromebook and will complete math activities. Some websites we use for Tech Time include Prodigy and Xtra Math. If you are interested in learning more about the tech tools we use, make sure to check out my YouTube channel.
3. Homework Time
I am a firm believer in allowing students time to work on their homework at school. When you give students this time to work on their homework at school you are teaching responsibility and you allow students the opportunity to ask questions if needed. The homework station normally only includes a page or two of math problems that match what we are working on in class.
4. Partner Time
With our lessons there are activities that students complete to review the content we are learning. These come in the form of worksheets, games, or other hands on activities. To reduce the amount of questions that I have to answer during this time, I allow students to work with a partner. When working with a partner students normally can help each other solve problems that arise. This limits interruptions to my small group work.
5. Practice Time
Here students are able to practice skills that they either need to review or that I think would be beneficial to go over before upcoming lessons. This station is complete with a partner and includes cards work for students to work on. This station has an answer key so students can check their own work once they have finished. I have created cards for back to school stations that my students will use.
6. Review Time
This is where I allow students to individually review content or skills that they are still working on mastering. I create digital worksheets through Google Forms and create Google Classrooms for each of our power standards. This way, I can simply tell students to log into a certain power standard and complete a specific lesson. You can gain access to these digital worksheets through a resources on my TpT store.
These stations become routine if you use them regularly and teach expectations at the beginning of the year. I display my groups and the station descriptions on the board during class. Students love the movement and opportunity to work with their peers. If you use any other stations during your math class I would love to hear all about them!
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