Circles, squares, and triangles... OH MY!

As I'm discovering the content for Kindergarten, I'm really enjoying teaching new material. It's a delightful experience to talk about shapes and how to describe them to my Kinders... and then be a part of getting to quiz my friends' third graders about the three branches of government.... I'm also enjoying reading through Debbie Dillers' Math Work Stations


This week (week 3) was the first time that we've really introduced math centers to the kids. But since we've been doing letter centers since day 1 of this year. Below are a couple of pictures of the fun centers that we did this week, I hope someone else can use these ideas as well!!!

On Tuesday I did a whole group lesson using our Elmo (document projector) on how to make pictures with shape blocks. My pumpkins are definitely loving this one but I'm having to remind some of them to stop 'building' and to make pictures. They are just trying to make 3-D pictures I guess!

 This is one of the kids' favorite centers this week! Our first week I pulled small groups to teach the kids 'A dot is a lot of glue'. My wonderful (love her!!!) para knows how to use the special copier that will copy on construction paper. It's so very cool! Each of my kids did a purple and a red paper. This was definitely a reminder of the 'dot is a lot' lesson.

 We've been doing a lot of letter hunts through our table books but my pumpkins got to do a shape hunt through magazines during centers. I created a simple t-chart for them to sort their shapes once they found them. Please excuse the pink sticky.. it's covering a pumpkin's name :)

In addition to these three centers, my pumpkins are playing shape concentration... a memory game with 6 possible matches (12 cards in all). Since my tables each have 6 students at them. I made 3 sets of the game and backed each with a different color construction paper. Well, I say I but really my super fabulous parapro did! Again, LOVE her!! She has really helped me to keep my head above water these first 3 weeks.  I'm slowly taking over a lot of the creating and what not. But I wouldn't have made it this far without her!

What kind of math centers are you doing? I'm looking forward to getting our schedule set day-to-day so that my kids can start using a center chart. I know that this will definitely help with the management aspect of centers.

Have a blessed day,