Why make manipulatives, chart strips, posters, and class games to only use them for one lesson a year? Reinforce lessons by placing the materials in centers after you teach!
This is a book called "The Doorbell Rang" that I use to introduce the concept of division in a meaningful way. In the story, 2 children are sitting down to eat 12 cookies, and figure out that they will get 6 cookies each. The doorbell rings and another child comes in, so they calculate that they will each get 4 cookies. This continues until they get to 12 divided 12, when Grandma arrives with a fresh batch of cookies! I read the story first, then have the kids act it out using the tokens as cookies (real cookies or even drawings of cookies would be better). Then each child gets his/her own set of tokens and demonstrates and writes each division fact as I read the story a final time. Afterwards, the book and tokens are put into the centers for students to reinact later. This center is kept in Body Smart (Bodily-Kinesthetic).
When teaching cause and effect, I downloaded some flashcards from the FlashcardExchange.com. (Printing these cards used to be a free service, but I believe there is now a $25 one-time fee for unlimited access to your own cards and thousands of others that are posted online by teachers). One half of the class got cause cards; the other half got effect cards. They had 3 minutes to find the person on the other side of the room that completed their cause/effect statement logically. Statements were then read to the class and evaluated for accuracy. Afterwards. the cards were placed in a center for students to either match up or play the game Memory with (in which all cards are turned face down and players have to try to flip over matching pairs). This is a Logic Smart center.
This class game was played the same way the Cause and Effect game (above) was played. The difference is that this game involves puns and multiple meaning words. In the center, students must match the riddles to the answers and write in their journals what the multiple meaning word is. For example, "Why is it hard to catch a refrigerator?" goes with "Because it's always running!". Students must identify the word "running" as the multiple meaning word and write that the word can mean jogging or like a machine with a motor going. I do not have the riddles in a downloadable form, unfortunately, but you can use pretty much any kids' joke books to find lots of riddles and puns on your own. This is a Word Smart center.
See how you can use BOOKS from your classroom library
and other PRE-MADE MATERIALS to make quick and simple centers!
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