Ten Minute Smarters, Con't.

Here are my 5 stations this week for Ten Minute Smarters, to give you an idea of what I do:

1^  These are my teacher guided readers. I introduce a reader they've never seen. We sound out and read through the whole book, then go back and re-read it with better clarity.

2^ This group is playing my Gingerbread Man game that I adapted off of an idea on Pinterest. They each have a playing form. They take turns rolling a die. They take the piece of gingerbread (brown tag) and place on top of the "puzzle". If they roll a number they've already used, they lose that turn. First person to cover up their form wins.

3^  This table is reading their actual readers (from our program). Since we've already been reading from these, they can self-guide by reading as a group, then reading one page or one sentence at a time Round Robin style.

4^  I like to mix math and Language Arts activities, since we do LA in the morning and math in the afternoon, and our Smarters "bridge" between the two.  This is another game I adapted from Pinterest. I made a die from a plain wooden block to match the shapes. The game is called "4 in a Row". They roll the die, then cover that shape on their mat (using the two-sided discs, although you can use whatever you have at hand.) First person to cover up 4 in a row either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally wins.

5^  This is a star pattern from Pinterest. It calls for only 2 players, but I found a table of 5 could do it just as well. Each player gets their own marker. First player rolls the die and then colors that many spaces on the star. (The Pinterest game also has a heart form I'll use later in February.) The sheet goes around the table with each person getting turn to roll and color. Once I call time, the person with the most colored squares wins.

Tomorrow, I'll rotate the games so that each table gets a new one. By Friday, all tables will have done all five "Smarters".