Literacy Center Update

I'm participating in the linky party over at Clutter-free Classroom. Click back to check out the other peeks into their classroom. 

We started literacy and math center this week and it went really well. Of course it probably helps that 6 of my 17 students are out of the room at this time. I was worried because we've only had free choice centers up to this week and I wasn't sure how they would take being told what center to go to. On the second day of centers, one student told me he loved doing these activities. Which made me really happy. Now that I'm into them I see some changes that I'm going to have to make. My center work board is not very user friendly and some of my signs need to be redone. I have some centers in baskets and the signs were too big for the baskets. So with my favorite thing, scrapbook paper, I redid the signs and used the kids' pictures to show where they needed to go. (see my post http://mskerriandherkrazykindergarten.blogspot.com/2011/09/im-so-excited.html to see what they looked like.)This summer when I was originally planned some of these centers I wanted to have 8 centers that I traded out the activities done in the centers. I was going to have an alphabet center, sight word center, writing, math exploration, math game, promethean board, reading (this would include listening and big books) and computer. But I've rethought this a bit. This is what I'm thinking now:

• Stamping center - practice sight words
• Play doh center - currently we're working on letters. But we could do numbers and words.
• Writing
• math exploration
• Math game
• Reading
• Promethean
• Computer
• Listening
• Art

I also like the sensory tubs and fine motor centers I've been seeing so I might include those too. I'm working on teaching them the centers and will add one new one a week. This week we've been working on stamping, play doh, math exploration, computer and promethean board.  I would like eventually for them to do 2 a day but we just can't make that work right now.
I had decided this summer I wanted to have letter parties each week for our letter of the week. In reality, I think it's going to be fun center activities on Fridays. So, we're had some monster m centers this Friday. One center was a matching game found on someone's blog that I can't currently locate. They made their own monsters out of construction paper. They turned out really cute. An m book that I made. They had to use our circle graph from the week to complete the book. The last one was covering a M in marshmallows. They had a lot of fun. I'll be posting my A activities hopefully next Monday with a flipchart and apple/Aa centers. So check back.
Hers are some of their activities. They turned out cute.