Activities To Do At Learning Stations

 

Now that you know more about learning stations and how to introduce them into your classroom, you need a list of activities to use.  So today, I'll be reviewing quite a few activitieors to help you get started.  Sometimes, it is difficult to come up with activities so I'll help with that.  

One station should be the teaching station where the teacher works with students in a small group either providing scaffolding or enrichment.  The lesson here should consist of a hook, guided practice, and a check and review on assigned work.

As stated earlier, one station can have task cards. Cards that have the problem so that students can work on each problem and the answer should be easily available so they can check their work.  

Another station can have games that involve dice or cards.  I've used dice before to help set up the numbers for a binomial multiplication problem, or a trinomial.  The cool thing is you can find dice that have up to 20 sides. If you have four to five dice, you can use them for students to practice order of operations.  

On the other hand if you have cards and students who need some practice with cards, try gains and losses where students start with 15 points. Then one student flips over the top card of a deck that has had all the face cards removed and if the card is black they subtract the value from 15 but if it is red, they add the value. At the end of the game or time period, the one with the most is the winner.  You can also do the multiplication of binomials with cards so black is negative and red is positive and you count the face cards as 11, 12, and 13. 

Have a station that has real world applications of the topic or concept students are learning.  For instance, students can calculate pitch for a roof, grade for going down a mountainous road or looking at what happens when you change the dimensions of a room using algebra.  It takes a bit of looking but these activities can be found. Check out Illustrative Mathematics, Yummy Math, YouCubed, or look for real world activities that have them collect and interpret data.  

One station should include some sort of online activity be it Desmos, Khan academy, have students create a flip grid video talking about how to do something, IXL or other site.  The lesson can be practice, learning how to do something, a quick quiz either in Khan academy, IXL, or even google forms.

These are just a few ideas that will help you get started with Learning stations.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.  

More On Learning Stations

If you remember, I mentioned learning stations as one of the ways of differentiating instruction.  This is something I've had to learn to implement because it was not part of my teacher training.  In fact, learning stations and learning centers were something done only in the elementary classrooms.  This year I have 12 students spanning grades 7 to 12 with abilities from quite low to fairly high and this is a way I can meet the needs of everyone.

Learning stations can be used for differentiation, providing spiral practice for concepts, while helping students learn to take more responsibility for their own learning.  In addition, technology can provide some of the activities for students. Don't forget, when you have students working at the learning stations, you can pull small groups of students out for specialized instruction or additional support.

One of the best ways to introduce learning stations is to do it once a week.  Set up one day a week such as Fridays so students have the whole period to work through the stations.  If you set Friday as the day, you can use it to have students review the whole week's material.  For instance, station one has them review Monday's material, station two for Tuesday, station three for Wednesday, and station four for Thursday.  You can have a fifth station that everyone visits so you can provide small group instruction, scaffolding, or extensions.  

As far as rotation goes, if your students have difficulty moving from station to station, you can move the materials from station to station or have the stations set up so they can all be done on the computer.  It depends on what is needed.  I prefer to only do one or two activities on the computer because it is hard to do a quick assessment as they work but if I can spend a bit of time with them, it is easier to do a flying assessment.  Make sure the groups are small so if you need to, you can do double or triple copies of stations.  For instance if you have 30 students, you might have two of each station so no more than five students are at each station.

When setting up the stations, think of having one where they work with the teacher, others with regular type assignments, technology based activities, and some hands on items.  Make sure to have a big, loud timer so when it goes off, students hear it.  If you plan to have students rotate stations, make them practice rotating by setting a one minute timer and explaining expectations before they move.  

When you set up the groups, let them stay in the groups for the first two or three weeks so they get used to working and rotating.  In addition, think about how long each activity will take. You want the activity to take as long or longer than the time planned at the station so no one finishes early.  You don't want one station to take 5 minutes while another takes 20.  It needs to be fairly even.

Always change things up while keeping them the same.  For instance, if you have a technology component, always have the technology component but change the program they use each week.  In addition, have some way for students to self-check work with an answer key, form, or QR code. Next time, I'll discuss some more details about what activities to use with learning stations for middle and high school students.  Have a great day.