Center Rotations in a Substantially Separate Classroom

If you're a substantially separate classroom teacher and I say that you should be utilizing centers, would you instantly write me off? 

I did when I first was told this, too. 

How can I be expected to have 8 students who all need 1:1 and significant levels of prompting to run through centers and have them be relevant to their IEP goals? I honestly couldn't envision it. 

Everyone who told me about the magic of centers seemed to have students that had less significant academic and behavioral needs, so their advice was easy to write off. However, as the years went by in my position, I found it harder and harder to meaningfully manage the time in between individual academic times. Our day couldn't be 6 hours straight of direct teaching trials, but we didn't have the resources to run  successful natural environment teaching sessions, either. First I started with file folders and puzzles. Then I added activities of daily living to the schedule. As I understood my students' needs better and better, I started to see that there were certain kinds of tasks that all my students could participate in some way shape or form that was meaningful for skill retention or generalization. It was this realization that bore the idea for my centers based classroom. 

Before we keep going on, I want to be clear- I am not setting up these centers so that 100% of my students can go through the system 100% independently. My students need an accessible educator in their lives for a reason- the environment needs to be made more accessible for them to be successful! I was kicking myself that I didn't come to that realization sooner, but that is the beauty of teaching- you can always improve and grow in your practice. 

Here are my centers in my classroom:

1. Handwriting & Computers: The students work on tracing, copying, printing, typing, and working on Boom Cards or Lalilo on Chromebooks. I have wet-dry-try boards, handwriting without tears books, various sizes of lined paper, letter mats, cookie sheets and magnetic letters/shaving cream, and individual student handwriting books to work on developmental shapes or their names. 

2. Independent Work: Students work through a small visual schedule of closed ended tasks that are at their independent level. See my post on independent work for more details. 

3. ELA & Math: Students work on worksheets related to our theme of the month (I use the Made For Me Literacy Level B unit all year) or on other programs they are using like Edmark, Connecting Math, or ALL. 

4. Puzzles and Games: This is a center where we work on social skills through completing puzzles and games. I have easy inset matching puzzles all the way up to jigsaw puzzles. The most popular games in my classroom are Connect 4, Yeti in my Spaghetti, and Don't Break the Ice. 

5. File Folders: Closed ended file folder activities are organized by type and difficulty. The sections I have are matching, sorting, money & calendar, alphabet folders, sound work, and math. 

6. Art: Every week I lay out a new art project related to our monthly theme. It is a great center to work on core words.

My centers are never staying the same, and that helps work on generalization and really cementing skills for students. I am constantly swapping out worksheets and materials. That might sound like a lot of work, but the key is not putting the pressure on yourself to do all the work! I use the Made for Me Literacy Level B materials all year round; I love how they are print-and-go and differentiated for different students. I also use pre-made file folders on TPT, Boom Cards that I bought on the Boom Card store, etc. If you were to make everything you needed to run each of these centers each week, this would consume all your time. It is better spent teaching your students! 

Students' days are blocked off into cubby and centers time in my classroom. Cubby time is when we do more traditional DTT or ITT, trial training or other kinds of 1:1 academic work. I like to think of cubby time as new skills and centers time as review skills. I have my students do 30 minutes of cubby time, followed by 30 minutes of centers, then back to cubby time, etc. The way they work through that centers time is by following a centers schedule. 

The centers schedules each have my students' pictures and names on them to help build their ability to recognize their name. Each center has a corresponding icon that we put on the schedule so students know where to go. Each center has a display that students match the icons to. When you find the matching icon, you know that is the center you need to complete. Once a center is complete (either you finished everything the teacher laid out of a teacher told you to check your center schedule), the students go back to their schedule to see what icon is next. The last icon on the schedule is the "all done" icon. We teach students to hand this icon to an adult to indicate they are all done with their center schedule and can have reinforcement time. For more on what this teaching process looks like, head to my post on using data in centers. 

The MOST important thing you can do with your centers is make sure that absolutely every. single. one. of your students can access SOMETHING in each center. Remember, our aim is to make centers accessible for all students. For some of my students, that means doing errorless tasks at every single center and just working on teaching the schedule sequence. For other students, I will eventually expect them to run through their centers totally by themselves if the work is laid out for them. It might look totally different from student to student, but the things you are teaching by doing a centers schedule are:

- time management

- task initiation

- following a schedule

- skill generalization

At the end of the day, aren't these things we want ALL of our students to have? This fuels me to always think about how something can become accessible for my students, because they won't be able to work on those important life skills if they never get the chance to practice them. 

If you are thinking about trying out a centers rotation in your classroom but don't know where to start, or maybe you've tried it but you're not feeling like it is working smoothly, shoot me an email and I would love to be able to help troubleshoot this with you!