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Hey everyone, today we're excited to explore the wonderful world of math centers and discover why using math centers in your junior classroom is going to help you to simplify and streamline the things that you're doing in your class and give you a system and a structure in which to teach your students math.
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It'll help to keep them engaged and also help you to facilitate guided math.
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There's many reasons why math centers should be an essential part of our toolkit, so let's jump in and figure out why there's such a benefit to using math centers.
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Even if you're a junior grade teacher, incorporating math centers in your classroom can be an absolute game changer for your students' learning journey.
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Math centers are more than just fun, busy work activities.
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They are designed to empower students to become more independent learners, critical thinkers and problem solvers, while also fostering social interaction and collaboration.
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By incorporating interactive, hands-on activities, math centers help to keep our students fully engaged in their learning.
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Gone are the days of the passive listening and uninspired textbook type activities.
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Math centers bring joy and excitement to the subject, making learning enjoyable and a much better experience for both us and our student.
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When students are more enthusiastic about math, they're more likely to retain the concepts and apply them in real life situations, the concepts and apply them in real life situations.
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Now, no two students are exactly alike, and that's where math centers really shine in allowing you to differentiate instruction for your students.
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They allow us to cater to the diverse needs of students and allow us to provide different types of activities or activities that have multiple entry points that allow us to vary the levels of difficulty and support that we provide students.
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With math centers, we can easily differentiate our instruction to ensure that each student receives an appropriate level of challenge and support.
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This personalized learning approach enhances comprehension and boosts confidence.
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One of the ways that you can do this is look at how much support or scaffolding is provided inside your center's activities.
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Do you do them as a group or do you have students doing them independently?
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This allows for you to have multiple entry points for students.
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It also means that there might be different roles that students can play or different ways in which they can access the content, which doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be 100% independent when they're ready to move on into independent centers.
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Now, most teachers think about centers as like a group rotation schedule, where you have, say, a group of five students and they physically move to one section of your classroom and then we rotate around these activities throughout the week.
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This is one way of doing centers, but it is not the only kind.
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There are multiple ways that you can run centers in your classroom and in junior grades we can implement a much more flexible schedule that meets the needs of your students.
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We also have to remember that just because we have four centers does not necessarily mean that our students need to go to all four centers.
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It allows us to be able to work with some students more often and have them participate in less centers, while we have students that are ready for additional practice and ready to move beyond can participate in more centers.
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We have different types of center rotations, from highly managed and controlled, where your whole class will work through activities together.
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This often works for students who are still beginning their independent work skills and have a hard time structuring their learning without some teacher control their learning without some teacher control.
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You can also look at your centers as being a more free flow and centered on student choice.
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This may be something you want to transition to as the year goes on and your students become more comfortable with the routine of centers and allow you to provide less of a structure, less of control over how they rotate through them.
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If you want easy centers, then the fewer routines that you put in will make it easier to run for your students.
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Every time you add a different routine or a different rule to your centers, it actually makes it more complex for students and harder for them to be successful.
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Sometimes, keep it simple and easier is better.
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Junior students can handle working independently when they have the appropriate structure and training in place.
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The reality is, if you want students to do something independently, you will need to make the routines simple enough to run without you, because you're going to be busy running guided math.
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So start by thinking of your centers as just simply a choice board.
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Each week, you will give your students three activities to complete.
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Have one spot in your classroom where materials are found
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and required for each activity.
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You will have a chart that tells them which activity to work on each day and students will work through the activity.
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The chart tells them to Give students a few minutes to gather their materials, that they need to get started.
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Use a timer to help train them to do this quicker and quicker as the year goes on.
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Reinforce these independent work skills and ensure that you are not requiring them to work independently for longer than they are capable of.
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Start with five minutes and quickly work your way up to a stamina of a maximum of 15 to 20 minutes at the most.
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Some students may not be able to handle that, so it's okay to have a quick brain break halfway through to ensure your students can jump right back in to that independent work so they're not sustaining independent work for quite as long when they can't handle them.
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Once they have this routine and they've gone through the structure, it's okay to just let them get started.
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We love using our Math Command Center or Organization Station as a central hub for all things math in our classroom.
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This is a free gift for you when you attend our live webinar.
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So this is a bulletin board that can be set up in your classroom.
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It is all of the center pages identified with other helpful math anchor charts, and it's the location of the center's bins hand-in bins for the subject.
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If this board is in an area that can handle high traffic, that's great, because your students can use this as they transition into their math class.
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If not, think of somewhere else in your classroom that you can put this.
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That would help keep everything organized.
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You want all of the manipulatives, all of the math to be in one place and really practice the routines on what it means to get started and to finish your math centers each day.
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The more structure, the more routine and the more repeatability you have in your math center.
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Time will make it a lot easier to implement in your classroom.
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The next piece is going to help you to be accountable is to help the students be accountable is really focusing on how you, as a teacher, hold them accountable.
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Ensuring that they can work independently means that you will have to have a high level of accountability for your students.
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Teach and train them to be accountable for themselves.
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They are doing this for themselves.
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There are going to be natural consequences for students who do not complete TAP and build that in.
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Allow them to take some ownership over their own success.
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Explain what you want very clearly and very simply and hold them accountable for these goals.
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This may take a month or two to implement at the beginning of the year.
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Start small with small achievable time periods.
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It might just start with you want two minutes of quiet, independent work.
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Then you gradually move your way up to three minutes of independent work.
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Well, you simply scaffold yourself out of that control piece so that they begin controlling themselves.
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Have them see the natural consequences to not completing their center's activities and teach them how to solve their own problems when they come up to you to ask a lot of questions which they will, because this might be something that they're really used to doing with teachers is constantly relying on the teacher to answer every single question and every single problem that they do Every time.
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They do this at the beginning, I want you to throw it back at them with a question what do you think you should do?
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What do you think is the best idea?
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Have you asked other people, say two or three students before me?
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I want you to try to solve this on your own.
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Let them solve it and then really celebrate the fact that they tried that independently.
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For many students that are beginning to get more control in our junior classrooms, they are probably used to classrooms and systems that are highly controlled by the teacher classrooms.
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They are probably used to classrooms and systems that are highly controlled by the teacher, meaning that they're not allowed to make any decisions on their own.
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They're not allowed any autonomy or any choice.
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So this is going to be a big of a transition for your student.
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Make sure that you are facilitating this level of independence, this level of problem solving, so that your students begin to realize that they don't need you to solve every single problem and that they can make the good choice, they can make the right decision and really celebrate those wins as they do it.
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Highlight the kids that are doing this as a great job.
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That will often help to reward those other students.
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Now we also don't necessarily need to mark everything, but we do need to hold them accountable in the moment
to show proof of their success.
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This might look like at the end of the center's activity.
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You have everyone put their work out on the table and you just check, as a quick survey, who was able to complete their work and who was not.
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You can even have students going and completing their work or self-assessing themselves as well, but make sure that there is some accountability.
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That accountability does not necessarily mean that you need to mark it.
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Marking is one form of accountability, but there's many others as well.
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Now I propose that we use four different variations of our math centers, and it's really convenient that it fits into the acronym of math.
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Everyone knows what we're doing and what these centers are for because it literally says math in the title.
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Now, I'm a big proponent of doing four centers math on your own, which is going to be skills practice that they do independently.
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There's apply your learning, where this is going to be problem solving.
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Hands on math, where it's not just repeatability but we also want them to apply their learning.
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You want to have this time with teacher.
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Now you can pull this time with teacher out of your rotation schedule, especially if you have some groups you need to meet more frequently and some groups you need to meet less.
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You need to meet less.
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You can replace this with a technology center allowing students to explore some games or interactive manipulatives and then pull your time with teacher outside of your center's rotations so that you can pull students as needed.
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You don't necessarily need to meet with students equal amounts of time all week.
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Let's truly differentiate our instruction and meet with the kids who need the most support more often and the less support less often.
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We also want a hands-on learning.
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We want students to use manipulatives, get down and dirty with the math and really deepen their understanding into not just how to do it, but also why we're doing it and that physical, concrete example.
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This is especially important for junior students, as they're in this transitional phase between beginning math and more in intermediate math, where they're really learning theoretical concepts and they're transitioning into more theoretical math from very concrete math.
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So, while we're in this transition, having a hands-on center is a really important element for your math program.
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Now we want to have this independent practice.
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We do want there to be just time that students can practice.
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There's a huge value in practicing a skill that we're teaching.
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So we want to be able to reinforce, have our students practice the skill that we've taught and perhaps work with others and help support each other.
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But everyone has to be accountable for completing their own work.
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This is a great way to differentiate.
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Depending on who is doing the work, you could provide a different level of expectations and bridge that gap between those who aren't quite ready for complete independence and need a bit of support.
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Use some peer mentorship here to help you.
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Now I love the applying strategy because I think problem solving is a key to that higher level thinking skills.
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So we want to give students the ability to collaborate, critically think and problem solve by applying what it is they learned in our lessons and the concepts that we're learning, to actually do something fun and engaging with the math and see the concrete examples of how that kind of math is used.
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Now this time with teacher is going to be really important.
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We want to allow for some scaffolded approach inside our guided math.
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We want to provide extra teaching or reteaching to students.
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We want to provide extension activities for those who need it.
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But one of the things I want you to remember is that true differentiation means that not every student needs to see you the same amount of time every single week.
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You can make this time with teacher either a very structured with groups, or you can also make this an open-ended and allow students to self-select whether or not they are ready to move on to the independent tasks or whether they need some extra support and help in re-teaching.
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This is a great flexible option for you to work with your student.
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It's also imperative for the opportunities for assessment.
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There is no better assessment than what you see with a student independently working with you on what it is they're working on, having them ask you questions, observing how they're solving the math and seeing where they're making errors or misunderstanding, so that you can provide quick and easy tailored support to help them bridge the gaps that they're currently experiencing.
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Support to help them bridge the gaps that they're currently experiencing.
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And finally, hands-on math because, frankly, math should be fun and it shouldn't always be hard, and we want to teach students that they are great at math and that math is really a great opportunity for them to have some fun and see some practical applications.
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So use this center as a way for your students to see joy in math in your classroom.
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Now, when it comes to math centers, marking is always the big question.
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Students are producing a lot of materials here inside your centers, so the natural inclination for teachers is that we should be marking all of it, and we mark it in terms of holding them accountable, but we also want to mark it just to see what they're doing and gather all that information.
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You do not need to mark all of their center's activities Strategically.
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Look at the center's activities they're doing.
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You can do a quick check-in by surveying that they're finishing it.
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You can also do a self-assessment and have them mark it based on an answer key and then just provide you with their mark.
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You can also just say I'm not going to mark.
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This is collaborative practice.
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It's not an actual reflection of their independent skills because we're not quite there yet.
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This is part of their scaffolded journey, so we don't need to mark everything.
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Take it up together, allow them to self-mark and use some of these as mini quizzes.
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The other thing I really like to focus on here is that this is practice.
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I use a math journal at the end of the week as sort of a big exit card and self-reflection and example, almost like a mini quiz at the end of the week.
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That provides a huge amount of assessment material.
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That is one thing for me to mark and I love it when students can take the things they did in centers and use those as examples in their math journal.
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It allows me to assess the math journal, which is one thing, and allows the students to apply all of the different learning that they did in their math centers and share what they did and what they learned inside their reflection journal.
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So I hope that gives you a little bit of an insight on how to use more math centers in your math classroom to simplify and excite and engage your students.