Charts are a wonderful teaching aid. Pocket charts give extra versatility as their contents can be regularly changed to increase student engagement. They are also great organizational tools for teachers and can help students visualize their day. This creates options for students to develop their learning in varied ways. Students can learn to work together, create independent sentences, and recognize words.
1. Helpful Highlighter
This activity uses the pocket chart station and colored see-through plastic to highlight different word sounds. Here, we can see all words with the ‘ay’ sound are highlighted yellow.
Learn More: Miss Giraffe’s Class
2. Winter Pocket Chart Game
This game is great for learning number recognition! Read the rhyme to the children and hide a Winter object behind one square. Have each child identify a number and come up and look behind their number for the hidden object!
Learn More: Clearly Primary
3. Shape Sorting Activity
In this pocket chart math activity, students will need to sort the different shaped objects underneath the matching shape. You could personalize this by adding photos of objects from around your classroom.
Learn More: Tots Schooling
4. Needs and Wants
This is a great activity to work through as a class to discuss needs vs wants. Needs should be things we cannot live without such as food, drink, and shelter. Wants would be ice cream, riding a bike, watching tv, etc. Students can sort these into the correct column.
Learn More: Little Zizzers
5. Poem Pocket Chart Activity
Write a simple poem that your kids can sequence in the pocket chart, alongside some simple pictures. First, have them sequence the pictures and then match the sentences to the pictures. Finally, they can add individual words. This helps kids recognize which words go together.
Learn More: Kindergals
6. Fall Food Sentences
This activity makes a perfect literacy center and teaches kids a variety of literacy skills. Learners will create fun Fall-themed sentences with the sentence strips and can discuss with their friends what Fall food they are enjoying. By adding sight words, you are teaching valuable academic skills.
Learn More: Mrs. Jones Creation Station
7. True or False
This fun game of true or false works as a challenging math center for kids. Set out two columns, true and false. Underneath, mix up some simple math problems with answers. Students need to then work out whether to place the problem in the true or false column!
Learn More: Amy N Jones Blogspot
8. Letter Hide and Seek
Place alphabet cards in a pocket chart. Place a small treat, like a jellybean or chocolate button behind one letter. Have students take turns guessing the letters. For an added challenge, students must write their letter on a whiteboard and hold it up.
Learn More: Differentiated Kindergarten
9. Name Activity
Perfect for letter recognition. Write your students’ names on colored strips. Have individual students come out and answer a simple phonics question such as ‘is the letter M in my name’ or is the sound ‘ay’ in my name? They can then place their name under ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Learn More: A Spoonful of Learning
10. Who is Here Today?
You can easily personalize this with student pictures from your class. A great visual to show the class who is in today! Using pictures of students makes this an engaging center for the classroom and is something that kids can refer back to.
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11. Visual Timetable
Having a visual timetable stops kids from asking the same question over and over. Print out cards with your daily activities on them and then place them in the pocket chart depending on the order of your day!
Learn More: Pre-K Pages
12. Our New Letter
Introducing letter names and having a letter of the day is a great way for kids to learn the alphabet! Displaying your letter of the day in your pocket chart, and examples of words that contain it will certainly engage your students. The brighter the better!
Learn More: Busy Mama and Her Boys
13. Alphabet Activity
By simply displaying letter cards in your pocket chart there are lots of engaging games you could play. Give students a reading pointer, have them come up and point to each letter in their name, and then say the letter sound.
Learn More: This Reading Mama
14. Snowball Sight Words
For this activity, children read the sight word in the snowball and build the word using the snowball letters. Encourage them to say each sound in the word as they build it too.
Learn More: Immy World
15. Gardening Activity
Firstly, separate the text cards from the image cards. Set your students up by saying something like, “We’re going to build sentences about the garden.” Each sentence will display something like this, “This potato is from my garden.” You can choose the vegetable for each sentence and encourage them to look for familiar sounds in the sentence such as “sh” and “th” to build sentences and help them read.
Learn More: The Measured Mom
16. Color Sorting Activity
This simple color-sorting activity is perfect to use in a pocket chart. Have your kids work with the pocket chart to sort the different colored cards into the correct column. Cards can be switched every day to keep students interested!
Learn More: Ms. Stephanie’s Pre School
17. Fiction or Non-Fiction
This resource is perfect for introducing different types of texts and the concepts of story elements, characters, settings, and problems. Have students work in groups to find examples of fiction and non-fiction texts and then complete the chart according to their book.
Learn More: Lessons by Sandy
18. Question of the Day
Kids love to ask questions! Display a question of the day in the pocket chart. Discuss potential answers as a class and add these underneath. Pick a different student each day to pose a new question.
Learn More: Proud to be Primary
19. Reading Centers
Display student names, or groups in your pocket chart. Next to these, state which reading activity they should be focused on. This could be reading to self, reading with a teacher, guided reading, or listening to a story. Making this visual gives students some control and stops them from asking what’s happening next.
Learn More: Tickled Pink in Primary
20. Compound Words Activity
Put your students in pairs to work on this fun game. The first person places one of their words in the pocket chart. The second person has to try and find the word that works with the first word to make a compound word. This is a great activity for developing literacy skills!
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