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Hi All, I teach 6th grade science and want to start including stations/centers. Do any of you have any ideas/suggestions to share?? Thanks!

I just did a search on "learning centers" (be sure to include the quotation marks) and found a lot of great journal articles that I think will help you. Good luck.

Hello, I am a pre-service teacher and recently conducted a workshop on the trees. There were three different stations: the reasons for the seasons, tree products, and another focusing on the parts of a tree. At each station, students first completed a whole group activity and then were allowed to choose between a few activities to complete for independent practice. I think that allowing the choice of activity was very motivating for students. Regardless of choice, both of the activities focused on the same concept, but were designed to accommodate the different types of learning preferences the diverse students possess. Importantly, I had to become a facilitator in the learning process and my students became the conductors of inquiry. In my opinion, workshops are effective because they are hands on, and interactively teaching scientific concepts to students. I found them to be very effective in my classroom.

I teach 6th grade science and have used stations successfully in the past, however with my larger class sizes (from 18 in the past to 33 now), I have found them to be less effective. I have used stations for minerals/rocks, erosion, botany, light/energy, and physical/chemical reactions. The kids really like them and with the discussion questions found in each station, the depth of the kids answers increased because of the conversations they had amongst themselves while participating in each activity found at each station. I enjoyed them, but the large numbers of students in labs, that have not gotten bigger with the increase in students, does not allow equal access for all of the students to see or participate in the activities. So, I find myself using them less and less.

Monica, a while back I created a collection of resources from the Learning Center on this topic. You can access it at:
Science Learning Stations
I hope it is helpful.
Carolyn