Guest Post: Thematic Work Stations (Weather)

Author Bio: Today’s guest post comes from Toni, an elementary school teacher with a specialty in differentiated instruction and designing hands-on lessons that incorporate the multiple intelligences. You can often find Toni writing for TeacherLingo.com, where teachers can buy and sell their original lesson plans, worksheets, and more. She is married to a middle school math teacher and is a mom to a mystery loving 7 year old sweetie-girl and a quirky little light saber toting 3 year old.

There never seems to be enough time to fit everything into the school day! By developing weekly workstations, or centers, around a common theme you can, ‘kill two birds with one stone”. What does this look like in practice?

Each week whatever topic your class is studying in the content areas becomes the theme for your student workstations; like weather or elections. As students move from center to center they will review the week’s content area topic while simultaneously practicing the five essential elements of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

Let’s look at a week of weather unit thematic workstations to see how this would look in practice.

In the phonemic awareness thematic workstation your students will work with the distinct sounds in spoken words. This workstation should include poems, rhymes, and songs about the weather along with task cards to go with each. Task cards may have them complete various activities like highlight the words that rhyme in the poem or clap the syllables in all the weather words mentioned in the song. The phonics thematic workstation should give your students the opportunity to examine and manipulate the sounds between letters as well as phonemes, or individual sounds.

You may set up a weather chart and have students focus on weather words with the ‘y’ ending like stormy, sunny, and rainy by writing and giving weather reports. Students may spell their weather words using magnetic letters or dry erase boards while awaiting their turn to give the weather report.

The main objective of the fluency thematic workstation is for students to practice reading text accurately and with proper prosody. Even the most fluent readers often struggle to read nonfiction text effortlessly. A weather reader’s theatre can be used in this station with each student in the center being assigned a part. If the equipment is available allow students to record themselves reading the reader’s theatre. Give each student a fluency checklist so they can self-assess as they watch their performance. Students may also buddy read both fiction and non-fiction books to practice their fluency.

Students will review weather unit words and their meanings in the vocabulary thematic workstation. A flannel board with each weather vocabulary word labeled and displayed gives students the opportunity to interact with the vocabulary as they tell and write stories using their weather words. Weather projects that reinforce the weather vocabulary are also a fun addition to this workstation. Students may review cloud vocabulary by making each type of cloud with cotton balls or puffy paint and then labeling and describing each. You may also have students make weather vocabulary booklets or complete weather word graphic organizers for further vocabulary practice.

The comprehension thematic workstation should allow students to practice both literal and inferential comprehension. This is a perfect workstation for students to reread or listen to the science textbook or weather themed picture books and then answer comprehension questions. The comprehension workstation may also be set up as a research station where students can study a weather topic of interest and show what they have learned by creating a weather game, writing a report or giving a presentation.

Simple weather experiments may also be set up at this center to allow students the opportunity to make predictions and inferences. While the workstations should keep students busily learning while you work with small groups, there are always fast finishers.

To keep everyone busy you may assign a larger project at the beginning of the week that students may work on independently at their seat each day as they complete their work station activities. You may also set up an area of the room with some extra weather themed books, games and activities for speedy students to choose from.