Seriously Super Stations!

I’ve been so nervous about trying stations with my huge classes…. prepping it, explaining it, running them, managing it… Yikes… I felt totally confident with stations in my small private school classes last year and the year before… I didn’t even bat an eye and they always went perfectly but NEVER as perfectly as today went. Today was beautiful… Today we were in flow… (If you’ve ever seen me present on classroom management you know that is my goal for every day… flow…. I don’t get it every day but when I do it is SO exciting!) Flow is the optimal state of intrinsic motivation. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says “The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Today we were there…

Here is me explaining the stations to my kids (sorry camera position doesn’t capture the look of all of the stations but there are pictures below too). If you don’t want to watch, read on:

Station 1: FVR- We didn’t get to start FVR earlier in the year because I haven’t had enough novels. I still don’t really but now I have more of my old “student created” texts, novels, and some of Martina’s El Mundo en tus manos articles. Since this was their first time “doing” FVR, I had to explain it to them. I will re-explain it in two weeks when we start it as their do now every day (we will do that every other week)

Station 2: Señor Wooly- They could play the video game or work on nuggets for any of the 4 songs we’ve listened to this year.

Station 3: Culture- They were provided with sentences in Spanish about Nochevieja in Spain and here in the US. They had to determine which sentences were about Spain, which ones were about the US and which fit for both countries and then they wrote them on the other side of their paper (I intentionally made this more work than any of them could complete in the 6 minute station time)

Station 4: Conferencing with Maestra: All the kids are familiar with self assessing on the interpersonal and interpretive rubric at this point in the year. They were self assessing based on what they think their over all grade is for the entire quarter (which ends tomorrow). On the other side I have the proficiency rubric for the quarter for reading, writing, speaking, listening, and culture so they can read and think about where they are in relationship to the “target”. They had to fill out the rubric and answer how they could improve their grade and push themselves in the upcoming quarter. Then they also conferenced with me.

Station 5: Working with all of our high frequency vocab in Quizlet.

Notice, ALL of these stations have enough work to fill a full 6 minutes so there was no fear of anyone “finishing early”. Tomorrow, we are doing stations again but instead of the culture station they’ll have a worksheet from Señor Wooly’s site on the song “No lo tengo” which we did this week.  The other stations will remain the same. I didn’t want to make the station time MORE than 6 minutes because FVR is new and 5 minutes is usually as much as I do for novices with FVR. I want them to WANT to read and enjoy that time, if it is too much time, they’ll feel overwhelmed.

Station Transitions: You’ll notice in this video I told them they had 60 seconds to move and then I started counting down from 10 after only about 20 seconds… I saw it was happening faster so after this initial transition, kids had to move in 10 seconds to the next station, get settled, then get silent. It worked REALLY well.

Here is a video of them working in the stations:

If you’re 8 months pregnant and waddling around, I seriously recommend this because it was nice to have a day “mostly” off my feet but where I felt confident they were still getting lots of quality, compelling, comprehensible input! Though, in between all of these classes I had to move my room back to normal to have the fourth grade classes. So I will be honest and say setting my room like this 3 times and resetting it again was HARD work but I am proud because I did it and it was AWESOME!

Love you all!!!

Until next time,

HAPPY TEACHING! (just 48 days til Wee Williamson/baby loc@ is here!!!!)

Love,

La Maestra Loca