Do you use a work board during Literacy Workstations? If you’ve been to our presentation on Work Stations you do!
Lots of teachers use a pocket chart like this one below to help students become independent during rotation time. A work board shows students they have work to do! And it helps students who might be coming and going from your classroom during work stations get started independently. With a work board, they don’t need your help to know where to go next or to know where they need to be!
If you want to use a pocket chart to organize, you can snag these FREE icons here. There a set for K-2 AND 3-5. (https://goo.gl/pL73nB) I still love the idea of a pocket chart. It’s practical for most classrooms, but I do realize it is 2019! Which means many of us do things that incorporate technology into our classrooms “these days”.
Instead of a pocket chart, some teachers choose to display the rotations on their Smart Board each day.
I suggest using google slides for this! It’s just like a pocket chart but in digital form. And if I need to tweak a station or two, I can access the document from anywhere! Let’s take a look at what a work board might look like in the digital world.
Notice it still has the student names at the top and two rotations. Fountas and Pinnell say teachers should be pulling a MINIMUM of two guided reading groups a day – which is why you see two rotations on this chart.
Just like on the pocket chart, we still have our anchor stations with icons to help match students to the right station. I like to change the background color to match the anchor stations for efficiency. For example, at the word work station, I have a blue ‘word work’ label with the same icon to help students know where to sit around the room!
Remember everyone’s FIRST stop on your rotation is independent reading. The only time kids would not be independent reading every day is if you called them to the Guided Reading table! That is reflected on the work board in the top row. Need help organizing for independent reading like this? Check out this post!
I’ve created this editable powerpoint for you to use if you want to try out displaying your work board next year!
This is yours to use – so feel free to edit ‘student name’ to your own students! You can also change out the graphics or tweak the anchor stations to fit your needs!
Click here to download.
Cheers!
