When I started teaching, I started with nothing – as I’m sure many of you did as well.
Everything was hard, but I remember that it was especially hard to do centres & come up with new ideas to rotate in and out.
I had my students in groups of four my first year, so I needed at least four different activities for them to do each day.
I later moved on to a system where I had my students in groups of two (which is what I still use now), and years when I have 20 students, that means I need TEN different activities at a time.
That’s a lot!
Way back 10 years ago when I started teaching, TPT wasn’t a big thing for French teachers. I had to reinvent the wheel every time I wanted a new centre activity; there was almost nothing already out there.
Buying centres that did exist was also expensive, and I didn’t always use them all/they weren’t always appropriate for the time of year when my students needed to practice a certain skill.
If you know me, you already know I love solving problems, so it should come as no surprise that I added these problems to my “to solve” list.
This blog post is all about the resource that I created as a solution to the problems of…
- Not having enough centres and
- Ready-made centres being expensive to purchase (especially if you don’t/can’t use them all)
And what is that solution? My Ultimate Simple Literacy Centres Bundle… the one resource every French primary teacher needs to make literacy centres easy!
What is it?
The Ultimate Simple Literacy Centres Bundle is a bundle of ONE HUNDRED different literacy centres – technically 10/month of the school year (Sept-June), but you can use them however you like.
It is extremely affordable (30 CENTS/centre) and flexible – each month contains the same 10 “core” activities, so you can use whichever ones you want whenever you want.
Each month contains the following centre activities:
- Play doh mats (alphabet/seasonal shapes)
- Letter formation practice (with dry erase markers)
- Trouve et couvre (a game with snap cubes)
- Tourne et couvre (a partner game with a spinner)
- ABC order strips
- Beginning sound matches
- Upper/lowercase letter strips
- Sight word builds (these correspond to the coloured word lists in my Apprendre les mots fréquents resource)
- Alphabet search
- Syllable counting practice
The centres can be printed and laminated for longevity and you can reuse them from year to year.
How to prep so many centres
One comment I get a lot is about how much prep it is to print & laminate 10 centres/month. Well, the great thing about this bundle is that you don’t have to prep anything you don’t want to use!
The bundle is so affordable that you can easily pick & choose which activities you want to use each month, and not feel guilty about not using them all.
Each month, just do an inventory of the centres you already have for that month (if any), and make a note of how many others you might need.
For example, if you need 10 centres because you have 20 students in groups of 2, but you already have écriture & lecture à soi ready to go, plus another one you already have from TPT, you would only need to choose/prep 7 others from the bundle.
To help you decide which ones to prep, determine which skills you’ve taught and your students are ready to practice.
Then, find the centres that targets those skills for that month and prep them.
When you’re done, store them safely until next year. Each year, you can prep more from the bundle to keep as options until they’re all ready to go!
I currently store mine in monthly bins in gallon-sized Zip lock baggies – I don’t love this system so I am switching to file folder crates & zip lock baggies this year so they are upright and easy to flip through.
How has this bundle helped me?
I love how this centre bundle gives me a huge library of centres but no pressure to use them all each month.
They only cost 30$ for 100 centres – each centre individually is worth just 30 cents, so if I skip a few of them each month (especially while my prepped “library” is growing), it’s no big deal. Before, I felt really guilty if I bought something and didn’t use it!
Each month contains the same style of game – so even if my students aren’t ready for sight words in Sept, I know that they will be by January and they won’t have missed the chance to use that centre.
Plus, once I teach a game or activity to my students once, I don’t have to reteach it each time – just a quick refresher is all my students need and they’re good to go!
My favourite thing is that no matter how many centres I do/don’t have ready to go each month from previous teaching years, I always have enough to “fill the gaps” using this resource. It has saved me from scrambling so many times!
Want to check it out?
You can CLICK HERE and enter your name & email address to try a free sample of “Tourne et couvre” from the September set. This is one of my favourite partner games! The full set has more game boards, but this will be enough to get you started.
The freebie is for practicing letters a-d, and comes in colour and black & white.
To see the full Ultimate Centre Bundle (and all 100 centres for just 30$) on TPT, click HERE. Each month is also available on its own, if you’re just looking for one set in particular – you can grab 10 centres for 10$ with that option.
Remember, to try a free game board for Tourne et couvre, just CLICK HERE and enter your first name & email address and I’ll send it your way! :)