Center Ideas for Kindergarten

Let’s talk about Center Success in a Kindergarten classroom. Center ideas in Kindergarten is all about what learning center activities we dived into during the second week at school. We will be moving our learners from play centers to work or skill centers activities at the main tables, but still allowing some play. So let’s dive into center ideas for Kindergarten.

Centers Ideas in Kindergarten

My first center idea in Kindergarten is to start centers on day one of school. We worked on teaching little learners how to use a clip to move from table to table using play activities. You can read all about center set up here. We started by placing play activities on each color coded table, which for me includes yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and green tables.

Then, we opened the gray table, which we will use as a play area for now but I am hoping to change into Osmo and Square Panda learning activities. We also opened our classroom kitchen, which is always a class favorite. Finally, we opened the iPad center. We have more areas to open, but we want to add areas slowly to ensure that our students can follow the rules and expectations in each area.
You can check out my center chart here.

Our next step for center ideas in Kindergarten is moving my color coded tables (yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and green) into work centers. This will start to happen on week 2 for our classroom. I try to make my centers super hands on and fun, so that my little learners want to complete the activities. They are playing to learn. I do not plan to have each table as a work center just yet, but we are working them up towards that.

Yellow Math Table

Our math center this weeks has me super excited. I actually gave my little learners a sneak peek of this activity on Friday and they lost their minds. They screamed and begged to get into the treasure chests NOW.

For this activity, my learners will be grabbing one treasure chest. Then, they will be opening and removing their ten frame pieces. Then, they will match the ten frames to the number inside. Since I assessed my students with counting, I know they can all count to ten. They can not all recognize numbers to ten, so this is a skill we need to be working on.

Orange Writing Center

Fine motor and writing are going to be an area of need for many Kinders this year, as it is every year. We have not had a chance to work on a lot of handwriting just yet, but I know we need to. So what does a teacher do? We focus on prewriting strokes like I have above. These handwriting books show the green dot on where to start and a red dot to show where to stop. We are using thin dry erase markers for this center.

We used these handwriting helping booklets for our Covid year and they were a huge hit. I plan to use them for centers and small groups often to get my learners working on strokes and handwriting independently. They make a simple and reuseable center idea for Kindergarten students since they will need to work on this skill many times.

Purple Phonics Center

Since I am moving my learners from play to work, I have to convince them that learning is fun. When I saw these Target Dollar Spot alphabet puzzles would be a perfect fit for a center activity. Students can either but the pieces in ABC order or they can match the uppercase letters to the lowercase letters. Remember that center ideas for Kindergarten should be very hands on an FUN for little learners.

Blue Unit Center

Here is even more center ideas for Kindergarten to address one of the greatest challenges we face year after year is the diverse needs on fine motor skills. This week we are going to start some All in One Fine Motor activities. I have these three levels of letter Oo printables so I can have different levels of learners who can all be working towards building their fine motor skills. My students can work on coloring, tracing, dot painting, hole punching, and even cutting skills all in ONE as a center activity.