Using Jar Activities in Workstations

Hi, it's Aimee from Pencils, Books, and Dirty Looks.
Workstation time can be a hectic part of the day.  It can be impossible to keep all students engaged and on task while you are trying to work with small groups.  Through lots of trial and error, I finally found a way to make stations fun and to keep students learning.

I've been using jar activities in my classroom for several years.  Activities in a jar seemed like a great way to focus on certain skills, make stations portable, and keep students engaged.  I get most of my jars at the Dollar Tree.  They are the perfect size, and they're only $1.00!

I keep the jars that students are using at the time for ELA workstations on a shelf in the room that is easily accessible.  

I store jar activities that aren't in use in plastic storage containers.  This makes them easily accessible throughout the school year since I rotate jars about twice a month.

I started with my Voice Jar.  This is still a favorite of all my students.

This jar activity can be used across grade levels to work on fluency through expression.  Students can use this jar with any genre.  They simply choose a voice card out of the jar and read their passage in that voice.  When I taught first grade, I would use this jar during shared reading time.  We would use our different voices to read poetry and other short passages.

I have made 62 jar activities for students to use throughout the school day.  Many of the jars are ELA topics, but I also use them for math workstations, early finisher acitivities, and community building.  One of my favorite jars is my End of the Day Jar.  The end of the day is one of the most hectic times in my classroom!  This jar encourages students to pack up quickly, so they can have an opportunity to pull a question from the jar.  It has been a life saver!  If you would like to try this jar for free, you can download it in my Teachers Pay Teachers store!

Check out my blog for other jar activities!

RAPP- Restate, Answer, Prove, Proofread

 

Hello! It's Allison Stuckey from Stuckey in Second!

 

 

 

 

This is part of a post that I originally shared on my own blog at the end of the last school year, I'm adding what I'm doing this year to the bottom of the post!

 

I'm going to share my Response to Literature workstation, which isn't too complicated or involved, but I'd like to share the work I've done with my kids throughout the year (in and out of workstations) to practice Response to Literature using RAPP.

The station that my students do every week includes a question about our weekly story. They have to use their book to go back and use text evidence to answer.

You could write any question from your own stories that your students have read and include "use two details from the text," for example. My students have been taught to use RAPP. If you haven't seen RAPP before, just wait, I have lots of pictures to show you below! :)

In order for you to understand how much I teach and RE-teach RAPP and how students should use it when answering a question, let me show you all of the places that students find RAPP in the classroom:

Anchor chart at the back corner of the room
(near my small group table for me to refer to anytime I'm there)

Randomly posted around the room, in case they need a reminder!

Across this long bulletin board on the other side of the room:

And, last but not least...ON EACH OF THEIR DESKS!!!

Yes, I may be crazy...but guess what? Some of them still forget.

Here are some of the tools that I have used to help me along the way. I use these tools on whole group type assignments first, before I let them try them on their own in workstations.

Graphic organizers:

If you'd like to purchase my RAPP Detective Packet, which includes the posters (color and black/white), bookmarks, desk tags, and graphic organizers, click below:

This year, I'm at a new school, and we are back at it! RAPPing, RAPPing, and MORE RAPPing. My whole 2nd grade team is in on the RAPPing fun!

This is our anchor chart that we created together this year, to help us have a visual all the time!

 When we score the RAPP pieces, we do it out of 5 points, so the example piece shows students exactly how I score their pieces.


On this particular day that we were practicing RAPP, there were RAPP reminders EVERYWHERE!!!

 

 We put the bookmarks inside the front covers of our Reading Notebooks, so we always know where our "cheat sheets" are!

 

On our desks!



If you'd like to see more workstations that I do in my classroom and lessons, please visit my blog. Here is the link to specifically workstations. These were a series of "Workstation Wednesday" posts that I created last school year!


Stuckey in Second's Workstation Wednesdays