Jen, a special education teacher, shows how to set up classroom centers for young students learning routines. She uses a farm theme with errorless matching cards, adaptive books, and simple counting tasks designed so students succeed independently. Start with play-based activities, then gradually add harder work as skills build.
If your learners are just learning how to function in the classroom and you want to try academic centers, this is the video for you. My name is Jen and I am a blogger here at The Autism Helper and I run a K-1/2 self-contained classroom. So many of my learners are brand new to learning, meaning they're learning to sit, they're learning to attend, and they are learning how to work in a small group. And centers are the perfect opportunity to practice these skills. Let me show you some of the activities that I do in my centers to keep my learners engaged and have appropriate materials. I love a good theme. In fact, I have themes in my classroom year round. Um, this week we are studying farms, and so I'm going to show you everything farm-themed that we do in our centers. So when we have a theme in my classroom, I talk about it a little bit at morning meeting our books follow, our read-alouds follow that theme, and then our centers follow that theme as well. Now when I tell you I have like brand new, just learning to learn kind of learners, I'm not joking. We are talking about errorless learning tasks, we are talking about easy matching. That's where my learners are for the most part. My goal is eventually to have 3 centers in my classroom rotation: a reading center, a math center, and a fine motor/writing center. My students are not yet ready for reading content, math content, and written expression. So I'm meeting my learners where they're at with some really well differentiated materials. Now I told you most of my learners were errorless or easy matching, and these task cards fit the bill. So these are just some very simple errorless matching task cards. I love task cards because I can give each learner a set and then they can complete that, and then we trade with a partner to check. And I love how there's only one answer here, and so this is really easy for learners to pick up on when they're learning how to complete something like a task card. For my students who are ready to do just things like easy matching from a field of 3, these task cards fit the bill, and I just love that they are working on similar tasks, but yet they are very differentiated. My task card center, I always use my horseshoe table. I just really like to sit right in the middle and then I've got 2 or 3 students working on those differentiated skills right here. And I really do feel as though that allows me to see the progress of everyone just from right where I am. I love a good horseshoe table for that. Next up, I use adaptive books at a center. And this can work on reading or math skills, but these Easy Matching Workbooks, this one is farm themed, so it fits right in, and this is just simple matching here. I'm adding the animals to the farm. I have Velcroed these pieces on. There's actually Velcro over here. I haven't undone this one yet, so students just pull it off and then put it on a Velcro place. Very simple matching tasks. So here I'm gonna match the tractors, and my students will complete this. If they need a little bit more of a challenge, I will pull one of our adaptive books. This one is Counting Animals. So while it's not perfectly farm theme, it is pretty close. I love that again, we've got a field of 3. There's no writing involved and we're counting the animals. I've got prompts to be able to read the sentence and then I can easily pick the correct answer and put it right there. And that's it. I know it doesn't seem like a lot, and that's by design. My students are learning to learn, remember? And so we are starting out low and slow, and I'm meeting them where they're at. I don't expect that they are ready for huge transitions, that they are ready for paper/pencil, that we are going to be able to get curriculum done in centers, anything like that. Right now I want it to be very play-based, very task-based, and I want to have something fun in the rotation so the students look forward to doing it. Once we've mastered those skills, I'll move into the academics of it all. But really, right now at the beginning of the year, this is where we're at, and that's okay. With a little bit of support and a little bit of creativity on my activities and a whole bunch of differentiation, my students are highly successful at centers. If you haven't yet tried centers because you are thinking that your students aren't ready, I would encourage you to give it a shot. The worst thing that happens is that You fail and you try again. But the best thing that happens is you learn that your students might be ready for something you didn't think they were ready for.
