MMI - 4th grade literacy centers

I've been posting about my weekly ELA plan using Wonders, and yesterday just finished my Wednesday routine description.  So I'm kind of getting ahead here, but everything I've made recently has been part of my Friday routine.  I've decided to make Friday a "Flex" day.  This means that we have a center-type day.  I'm sure there will be plenty of days where students have a must-do list, but the idea is for them to use this day to practice skills they need, while I work with small groups, or do guided reading.  It's a FLEX day, whatever we need is what we'll do.

Tara, over at Fourth Grade Frolics, has a great linky called Monday Made It.  When I first started blogging this summer, this linky gave me wonderful ideas and inspiration for my own classroom.  My Readbox and Quote board (see pics on "My Classroom" page) came from stalking other blogs that linked up on this site.  In the summer, Tara did this weekly, but now it's once a month.  That's the reason I'm jumping ahead a bit to Friday.  I do plan to elaborate more later with a "Friday" post.

 

So, even though I made my "Choose Your Challenge" board before school started, we just added our categories and items and started our Flex Friday recently.  The students love it, and did a great job of being on task.  

 

We are starting small, with only a few options.  But this will obviously grow.  The stars are for tougher challenges, so that our board suits all needs.  These items are laminated so that we can use dry-erase to change the options easily.  The categories will stay.  My favorite item (and the students) to share are the partner plays I learned about from another blog.  90 different partner plays, grouped by themes, that are quick 1 page, front and back, for students to use to practice fluency.

by Deb Hansen

This really is made-it 2 and 3, but I also made some center items for my Friday Flex.  They align to two skills we've covered, compound sentences and text features.

Please see my "Wednesday" blog post to learn more about our compound sentences.

My product on TpT

Here is a picture of a group of students working with the different sets last Friday:

The other center is for text structures.  Even though most students do well with this, after I gave the assessment, I let certain students know that they should fit this matching activity into their Flex time.

My product on TpT

Here is a picture of a student using these matching cards.  They are self-checking, so she is checking to make sure that each set (feature name, description, picture) has the same letter on the back when she flips them over.

So that's it for now.  Have a great Monday, I'm looking forward to checking out everyone's Monday Made-It links later today!