Fact or Myth? You need a new math activity for each rotation every day!
That is a MYTH and could not be farther from the truth! When I use to do math centers in my classroom, I thought every center and every day needed to be different. This was a big reason why I stayed away from using math rotations for a couple years. Once I started looking into math rotations more, I realized that this was not true at all! I did NOT need to find a new activity for each rotation every day AND I found a way to plan that didn’t even involve me looking for new activities every week. In this post, I will be sharing how to plan out your rotations without taking hours each week and I will be sharing some ideas for different math rotation activities.
Planning Rotations
I used to spend every Sunday afternoon planning out my math rotation activities each week. Sound familiar? After doing this for far to long, I decided that I didn’t want to give up every Sunday afternoon anymore. So, I decided to try to start planning my math rotations and activities by units. This was a gamechanger! I no longer spent time every week finding or creating activities for my math rotations that week. Instead, I would spend time at the beginning of a unit mapping out what activities I would do for that whole unit. Then, I only needed a little time each week to gather up the activities I chose and get them ready.
Not only, did this save me from having to plan and find activities every Sunday afternoon, but this also helped me choose activities that fit the whole unit and were more meaningful to the standards being taught. This was a win win for me!
You may be thinking, “that still sounds like a lot of work”. I am not going to sugarcoat it and say it is not work, but it is not as much work as you think. After the first year of using math rotations, I could use the same activities from the year before and just have to switch out the ones that didn’t work well or ones that I knew would be helpful for that specific class. Like anything new, it is more work up front, but trust me, you will be so glad you made this switch and by year 2 or 3, you will be breezing through finding activities for math rotations.
Choosing Rotation Activities
I found that I was choosing activities all wrong when I taught using math centers. I started by looking for games and activities that I thought my students would think are “fun” and were not just worksheets since this was something I was trying to get away from. Then, I would find a way to fit these activities into my math centers and align it with what I was teaching. I too often, bought an activity and never used it again and spent WAY too much time teaching my students how to do new centers. Oh my was that backwards thinking!
Not long after I started using math rotations, I asked another teacher (this teacher had been using math rotations for a couple years), “how do you find activities that your students will like, will be easy for them to understand and aren’t a lot of prep work for the teacher ?”. She explained to me that she didn’t do new activities every day, she had different types of activities for each rotation and she did similar types of activities that her students were familiar with already. Wow… that sounded so much easier than what I had been doing. I was still a little hesitant about it because I worried that my students would get bored with the activities and they wouldn’t be as engaging as I wanted them to be. You have probably guessed it by now, but my hesitancies were wrong!
Here is what I discovered:
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- My students actually liked the repetition of types of activities in the centers because they knew what to expect and understood the task!
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- I had to switch up activities a lot less often than I thought I would because I was not coming up with a new activity every day. Some activities took the whole week for my students to complete.
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- It was a lot easier to align activities that I already knew to what I was teaching and I was no longer spending hours looking for activities each week. For example: I would use the same WITS word problem template and just switch out the word problems to align with the standard.
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- My students were still very engaged with all of my activities and were even asking to do them again!
Now, let’s get down to the nitty gritty of what this looks like! The first year that I used math rotations, I compiled a list for activities that I noticed worked well for the different rotations and my students told me they liked. Then, as I decided on the activities for the math unit, I would look at this list. I would not do the same activity type every week, but I would rotate through a smaller list of activities instead of looking for different types of activities to do each week. I made sure that at least one of my rotations would have an activity that could be completed throughout the whole week. For example, for the math facts rotation, I created a bucket of activities and would only switch them out every couple weeks or even sometimes once a month.
Take a peek at the picture below to see what I used to “dump” rotation ideas that I wanted to remember for the next year.
Remember, choosing rotation activities can be a daunting task if you let it be, but by intentionally planning and creating a list of activity types for each rotation, it will be a lot easier to manage and you will not spend every Sunday afternoon looking for activities anymore!
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