My colleague who teaches next door to me and I had a brainstorming session this summer about our Literacy Work Stations.  Last year, we had to wait so long to get our work stations up and going that it nearly killed us! 🙂  This year, we were determined to get them going as early as possible.  We wanted our routines going smoothly so we could start introducing our more “normal” daily schedule.

We decided that if we were going to introduce them earlier, we would focus more on the idea that the children would learn how to get the materials out, use them for a specified amount of time, and learn how to put them back.  We decided to dig through our cabinets and find materials that the children could use independently, with little to no direction from us.  Here’s what we came up with:

We realize this idea is not rocket science, but because we had a little more freedom this year to decide when we were going to start our “normal” routines, we decided to jump in with both feet and introduce these on the 6th day of school.  We let the children use these materials for 5 days (they rotate through 2 tubs each day) and then the following Monday, we started introducing more specific targeted materials.

I’ve prepared all 10 Work Stations from my BTS Literacy Work Stations pack and have been introducing them one day at a time.  These activities are simple activities that require very few materials and can be used over and over (if laminated) by many students.

As I get them all introduced, I’ll take some pictures and share them. 🙂

Our hunch paid off…15 days into school and our kids are ROCKING their Literacy Work Stations.  They already know how to read the chart independently to find out their station for the day and they know where their stations are located.  We can also clean up fairly quickly and get the tubs put back in number order. 🙂

I’ll share my Math Work Stations next week. 🙂  We waited a week to introduce those so we wouldn’t confuse our new kiddos. 🙂