Day 9/10-"Centers"

I tried the reworked version of my centers and found that it still needs a little tweaking, but it is definitely headed in the right direction.

The baskets worked great!  I had all of the supplies including printed directions in each basket.  I assigned a Captain and a Supply Manager for each group. My Captains kept everyone focused on the task and kept track of time.  The Supply Manager distributed the supplies out of the basket, read the directions and collected everything at the end of the time limit.  I feel like they did a good job with their roles so that is staying.

I did change the desk set up though, I had three groups of six which I really liked, but 1. it was hard to get them in position, and 2. this is a very chatty group of students and although I'm working on getting that under control, I think its too many together.  Right now they are paired up in rows and I have three groups, I had  the middle pair split up and one will move to the right and the other will move left.  So it will look like this:

xxx     xxx

xxx     xxx

xxx     xxx

I  still had 3 activities but I made two baskets instead of one.  Also, instead of the basket moving, I had the students move in order to give them a little leg stretch during this long block.  This worked really well even on the first try!

This afternoon, our external instructional coach came in and I got some really good feedback.  She said I was on the right track and gave me some things to tweak. Especially the type of work I should be having the students do.  I am super excited to try it out tomorrow.

Another observation I've made is that this group of students, while they are challenging as far as their behavior goes, they have already demonstrated some great math talk and reasoning!  I can't wait to start actually blogging about their math soon!!