Giving Math Rotations a Spin

This summer as I was surfing the many different teaching websites I stumbled across the idea of using math rotations over at 3rd Grade Thoughts. The more I read the more excited I became. Last year I found I had a difficult time differentiating my math instruction and had thought about trying to work in small groups but wasn't sure how to start. Stephanie's blog posts gave me an idea of how to get going.

After a month of introducing the concept to the students we have finally completed our first few weeks of full Math Rotations. Right now I'm trying to convince myself to stick with it. It is definitely going to take some getting used to. I have learned that I am still developing the habits and pre-planning necessary to make these rotations work. On the plus side though the students love it. They are always more excited when they see Math Rotations on the schedule instead of plain old Math class. It  has not gone as smoothly as I hoped but I am learning first attempts seldom do so I am going to share with you some of my thoughts, reflections and plans for moving ahead to try and make this system work for me and my students.

First of all I have to say that I am loving the chance to work with smaller groups of students. I feel I have a much better grasp of where students are at and how I can help them which is great. One thing I need to work on though is ensuring my high group is feeling challenged in their learning and my lower groups are able to complete the practice sheets provided by the curriculum. I am still trying to decide how I am going to deal with this. I find it is a common issue to have in math - one group finishes the required work in 10 minutes and another group needs 40 minutes to do the same sheet. I might try giving the lower group fewer required questions (they need to finish part a and b of each question) to complete and see if that works. If they finish the required amount early they can try to complete the rest of the questions. As for the higher group I am hoping to gather a collection of challenge sheets that will push them beyond our current curriculum to ensure they don't get bored. Like I said... still working it all out.

The other aspect of this that is fairly new to me is the Math centers portion of it. In the last couple years I have spent more time putting literacy centers together and haven`t really gotten around to Math centers. Our curriculum has lots of hands on activities and games scattered throughout so I never really felt the need to use centers before however with Math Rotations centers are pretty much a necessity. For the first month I tried to have centers related directly to our unit of study however I found students seemed to be getting bored with them since it was a lot of the same thing over and over again. I think when I change them up I will try to have centers dealing with different math skills I think are important. That way they get extra practice as well as some exposure to concepts we will be covering later in the year. One thing I do know is I will be spending some a bunch of time figuring out new centers in the next couple weeks. How do you plan/organize your centers? I would love to get more ideas on how to keep it as simple as I can for myself. 3rd Grade Thoughts has some great ideas but I am always looking for more.

Finally I am re-evaluating how I have organized my centers. So far it has worked fairly well and the students always seem to know where they are supposed to be and what they are working on I'm just not sure I like how I move the kids through the centers. Right now I am using a checklist to keep track of what center

students have completed and am trying to constantly remind them to keep track of things in their Math journals. It's slightly chaotic and I feel there has to be an easier way. I think I may try putting together center packets and having students use their Math duo-tangs to move through the centers. I will still use the clips with their names and move them from center to center but my hope is if they have everything in advance they can be a little more independent and move through the centers themselves.

Wow... that was a long one. Basically my thoughts on Math Rotations are this:
1. They require a lot of pre-planning to ensure you have everything ready to go.
2. It takes work to keep it organized and to update the centers on a semi-regular basis.
3. They are totally worth it if you want a way to differentiate your instruction and keep students engaged in different math activities during class!