Stations are….
- [Sometimes] low prep.
- Students getting CI from a source other than me.
- Everyone working at their own pace.
- No one getting left behind: stations let me sit with students who need support with their reading, without slowing down my students who process more quickly.
- Built-in early finisher activities. Done with numbers one and two? Get on the ActivBoard and do a review game, or pull it up on your phone.
- Stations are differentiated instruction.
I had another activity planned today, but I ended up switching gears about 7:45 this morning. I began my school unit yesterday, introducing school supplies and classes. At the end of class yesterday, my students wrote out their schedules in Spanish. The schedule-writing activity is important to me because, although it’s basically just copying vocabulary, it gives students a chance to identify what words they need to talk about their own classes, and organize that information in a logical way. The schedules will be the basis for a number of activities throughout the unit, so I wanted to make sure all my students completed it. Except all my juniors missed first period yesterday, and it took forever to present the vocabulary in fifth period, and my seventh period takes a long time to complete any written assignment because they have trouble concentrating (even I’m a little ADHD by 7th period!). So how to get everyone caught up, without having the people who did their work yesterday sitting around doing nothing? Stations. I know this isn’t the most exciting collection of stations, but it accomplished what I needed from the activity: everyone finishes schedules, most everyone does the reading and gets some more contextualized CI for classes and school supplies (and if you didn’t, sorry, you’ve got homework), and my early finishers get to play some review games, rather than goofing off, sleeping, or playing on their phones. Success.
Ms. Brown Spanish 