I love centers! How about you?

Learning centers are a great way to practice skills.  I try to make my centers as fun as possible!  The centers you're about to see I made by reusing items that I already had.  Just so you know, these centers I made over the course of a year.  I am constantly taking old center and making them new!  

I took this game of Checkers and made it into a sight word memory game.  

I don't know about you, but I have a ton of dominos.  Here is one way that I use them during centers.  The object is to count the dots on the domino and place the domino under that number!  

If you have some extra sentence strips lying around make a number order center! When the number puzzles are in order they get to practice writing the numbers on a whiteboard.  As you know, kids love whiteboards.... so naturally this center is a hit.

  
I hoard egg cartons!  I know it sounds weird, but you can use them for so many things!  In this center I took 2 egg cartons and a bunch of plastic easter eggs to make an uppercase/ lowercase letter matching game.  You can take this idea and turn it into a rhyming game, sight word game, number game, etc.  

Don't you love the big dice?  I sure do!  The best thing about them is they don't make a loud noise when thrown on the ground.  Anyway, this is an addition center.   Roll the dice, add the two numbers together, and color in the sum on the graph.  Love it!

This was a Valentine's Day center.  I took a cookie sheet and taped dye cut hearts to it.  On the hearts I copied the messages that are on the heart shaped boxes above.  The object of this center was to match the boxes with the heart that has the same message.  Once they were finished they practiced writing the messages on a whiteboard.

Here is another way to have your class practice their alphabet, numbers, rhyming, and sight words. You probably can't see it in this picture, but the clothes pins have the other part of the match written on it.  

I had these popcorn boxes and decided to make it a rhyming center.  The object is to  match the rhyming words to the box.  Then write all the rhyming words on whiteboard.   

In this center they are making words with magnetic letters.  It was easy to make, all I did was glue dye cuts to a sentence strip, write the name, and laminate.  

This is one of my centers right now.  We are practicing ending sounds.  With this simple center they have to match the word to the picture and the find the ending sound.  


























Sandpaper numbers are a great way to have the class practice forming their numbers and recognizing them.   It was simple to make, all I did was buy sandpaper, use the dye cut machine to make the numbers, then I glued the numbers to paper.   For some extra fun, blind fold the kids......they love it!