August 2000
 

The left end of the south wall -- math manipulative cubbies and shelves for literacy center materials.  My Home Reading Connection program materials will store on top of the cubbies.

The finished look, with room on the floor for the children to sit and face the big wall to the left, for large group instruction.  The table in the foreground is where I read daily with each child.  My assessment materials and books for my Home Reading Connection project are in baskets and bins, within arm's reach.  I'll be bringing my Discovery Packs materials back to school by mid-September, so that the kids can start taking home a thematic pack each week for homework -- I'll have to carve out a space to store them.  The large blue tubs beneath the table (there are 2 of them) hold additional Math Their Way materials that aren't needed until later in the year.

Large teaching area on east wall, at right angles to shelves in picture above.  We read the "I Can Read Colors" poem the first day of school and make a Big Book from the text, with illustrations by the KinderKids.  The sentence strips around the boy are the text to an emergent reader called "I See Me," by my friend Vicki Witcher.  The kids will get the book with these sentences (and Vicki's whimsical illustrations) early in the second week of school.  The book is great for tracking, one-to-one correspondance, and also teaches the names of body parts (last year one of my boy students called his ankle his "leg elbow").  Like all of my walls, this one is used for Read the Room during Literacy Centers.

The boxes on the floor (with the big red apple card and the brown bear card) are math workjobs.  Soon there will be enough work jobs in use to fill the space along the bottom of  the wall.  You can create your own workjobs for reading, alphabet recognition, math concepts, etc., from materials you have on hand or can easily create/obtain.  There are three terrific books about workjobs, written by Mary Baratta-Lorton, founder of Math Their Way, and all three are once again in print and readily available:  Workjobs: Activity-Centered Learning for Early Childhood Education, Workjobs II : Number Activities for Early Childhood, and Workjobs for Parents: Activity-Centered Learning in the Home.  Another helpful book for creating independent math learning activities is Instant Math Storymats: With Hands-On Activities That Build Essential Primary Math Skills.

Moving down the east wall, the Word Wall is ready, and there are organizer workboards up for Literacy Centers, Math Centers, and Developmental Centers.  I use a laminated-and-cut-apart alphabet frieze for my word wall letter labels, attached to the board with peel-and-stick magnets.  Beneath the board are number cards, with the number words in English and Spanish.

Outstanding activities using the Word Wall are found in Pat Cunningham's Phonics They Use: Words for Reading and Writing.  Another must-have book is Teaching Reading and Writing With Word Walls : Easy Lessons and Fresh Ideas for Creating Interactive Word Walls That Build Literacy Skills.-- a huge title for a terrific book to use with emergent and early fluency readers.

The table with the red edges serves many purposes ... sometimes it holds reading materials, sometimes it's a work area, and sometimes it's our Science center, which is why there's yellow tape dividing the table in two ... it helps the kids to keep their materials on "their" side of the table.

What About All Those Pocket Charts?

In the picture above, I've placed pocket chart stands in front of the computer tables behind the large computer workstation.  Most of my pocket chart stands roll, and they're constantly being moved around during the day, so we can access to different areas.  Pocket charts are my absolute favorite tool for teaching reading, and they make great Literacy Centers.  I'm starting the year with 12 movable pocket charts, filled with songs, poems, name games and other wonderful activities that help my students learn to read, write, and manipulate print.

For more info on what I do with pocket charts, please visit the KinderKorner website Pocket Charts pages.  I use many ready-made pocket chart sets (from Scholastic and Creative Teaching Press) and also make my own pocket chart materials for songs, poems, the My Books from Scholastic's Literacy Place reading series, and many of the blackline books my KinderKids keep in their individual book boxes.  There are several resource books that I go back to often for new ideas: Pocket Charts for Emergent Readers, The Pocket Chart Book, and Building Literacy With Interactive Charts are my favorites.
 
 

Close up of my workboards.  The color bears board is used for Literacy Centers ... each color bear group consists of 3 to 6 students grouped by reading ability.  I post 3 to 6 work job cards in each column, giving each group several jobs to do each day.  At the end of the day, I move all the cards one column to the right, so that all 5 groups do all the activities by the end of the week.  A great explanation of how to use the Literacy Centers workboard is found in Guided Reading:  Good First Teaching for All Children, by Fountas and Pinnell.  The book includes blackline masters for the job cards.

The card with the colored squares is for my math groups, and the 4 column board with animals is for Developmental Centers, which we do mainly near the beginning of the school year ... that time period is later replaced with hands-on science and art projects.

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This page went online August 27, 2000