Center Saturday

we love our center time.

This year I have changed my centers to be MATH focused.

So far, this strategy given me

MORE time in my classroom for

because so much of my math practice time

is spent in centers…

with hands on FUN activities.

And, of course,
all my centers are cross curricular.

This past week, my

learned about the Letter Pp,

Veteran’s Day, and we started working on ordinal numbers.

 I did run 6 stations this week too.

Each station is at a COLORED table in my room:

yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and green.

Here is my center time board.

 I ask each student to complete 2 work centers on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

They can play after they complete 2 work centers.

You can see all the play centers with their clips too.

Any student that struggles to complete their centers or does it wrong,

they get to do it again and get extra help, especially at the end of the week.

By Friday, everyone is done and we all get to play!

Green table held our Veteran’s day Fill the Ten Frame Game.

It is always a hit.

I love hearing my students call out the branches of the military as they play.

We also ask them to compare numbers to tell us who got
the most, the least, or the same amounts.

Here is an up close picture of this game.

We even have them predict which one will win.

Our orange table hosted the write/match mats this week.

I had 4 Pp pictures read to go for this station.

You can see the pig mat and the parrot mat.

 Let me walk you through what my

completed this station.

First, my students traced the numbers on the mat.

Then they have to match the number cards to the mat.

When they are done, they make the picture again.

You can mix and match the pictures too if you don’t want them

to know which picture they are creating over the mat.

Was it a hit… YES!

My students loved it.
They hate starting from the top to write numbers,

but adding the Pp pictures to the mats makes all the difference in the world.

The red center this week had some popcorn fun!

These

I also like seeing them and encouraging them to count using tens and ones.
Some also count back from ten to get their numbers.
Again… building that number sense.

Purple center was delicious.

We used these pie table tents to fill in our missing numbers on our pie cards.
The simple fact that they wrote on PIE made them happy.
Funny how the little things are so cool to 5 year olds.

The blue table hosted the Veteran’s day activity.

I made four sets of cards, each with a different color for management reason.

And our last center of the week was at the yellow table.

I used this spinner game from Marsha from

It was a success and my students loved to play this game.
I used some spinners I had and added them to the circle template Marsha provided.
I taped the spinner on top of a CD holder and it worked amazingly well.
{And amazingly cheap.}

I will absolutely use more of the spinner games in her pack soon.
My kids can’t wait to SPIN some more.

I hope this post gives you some FUN and meaningful center ideas for you to use in your classroom.

I used these packs this week: