Puzzles as Work Tasks

When I started my first teaching job in January (yes...the middle of the year!), I entered a classroom with no materials and four out of control kiddos!  My coworkers were nice enough to lend me some of their materials to get started, but I still didn't have enough to keep those busy hands occupied all day!  One of my aunts/uncles gave me a gift card to Lakeshore Learning as a graduation gift and I scoured the website for hours trying to find which product would get me the most activities for my money!  I ended up buying a set of 26 alphabet puzzles!  Of course, this was 6 years ago now, so the puzzles no longer exist on their site, but these bad-boys have lasted me all 6-years of teaching (and probably led to my obsession with Lakeshore!).  I kind of forgot about them because they were all cozied up in one of my cabinets, but they were a great thing to stumble across this week as I was looking for new work tasks for my class!

In my classroom, work station is an area where students work independently on skills/tasks they have already mastered.  This allows them to learn how to work on their own without an adult as well as give them additional practice opportunities to maintain skills.  I store all their extra work in the tubs on the right (in the picture below).  My assistants place 1-5 activities (depending on the student) in the drawers on the left.  Each day, the students go to their drawer, open it, take out their work and walk to a desk.  There, they complete the work and when they are finished, they return it to their drawer (where later my assistants undo the work and set-up new tasks for the next day).  A lot of this work gets repetitive, so I am always truing to think of new things to add....my Lakeshore puzzles being my latest addition!

 I picked out the puzzle that still had all the pieces and placed them in one bin with some cookie trays I bought at the dollar tree this week.  The hard part about giving puzzles as work station tasks are that students usually need to clean them up when they are finished.  When this happens, the adults have no way of knowing whether or not the students completed the task correctly (or at all).  That is why, we are using the cookie sheets.

 So, students take out their work. 

Complete the puzzle on the cookie tray (I had to cut a little slit because they were slightly too small....ugh!)

Then, return the completed task to their drawer. 

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