Gingerbread Math Stations

We've been spending all of December working on these gingerbread math stations. These are perfectly themed because they don't have to be Christmasy, but they could be all at the same time! We could literally continue these on into January if we really wanted to. We just happen to have a gingerbread day in December (that I still need to blog about) so it goes perfectly for this time of year in our classroom. Here's a look at all 12 stations in my Gingerbread pack! Each station comes with an instruction card to make it easy to read by the teacher and student, an answer key if applicable, and recording sheets in black and white or color to use how you wish! All of that plus the fact that they are aligned to the Common Core standards which are posted on each instruction card. The work is done for you!! :) 

Gingerbread Roll & Cover for addition or one more. Made fun with peppermint candy covers!!

 You Can't Catch Me game board with a gingerbread spinner.

 Baking Up Shapes where students practice identifying 2D and 3D shapes. Here they are using a timer to see how many they can name before the timer runs out. 

 Lil' Gingy Count On - the students draw a number card, record it, and count on the next two numbers in the sequence.

 You Caught Me card game working on greater than, less than, and equal to!

 Tasty Measure 'Mints' station to work on measuring with a peppermint ruler. 

 Sugar Shake & Spill could be used to decompose any number your students need to work on. An easy way to differentiate for your little mathematicians. :)

 Spin & Make a Gingerbread Family - students spin two numbers on the gingerbread spinners and add them up!

 Hunt for the Gingerbread Man game that can be played like Monster Squeeze. One student hides the gingerbread man behind a number while the other student hides their eyes. Then the other student guesses the number it is behind. If the number is five and the student guesses six, for example, then the player would turn over six through ten to show the gingerbread man is less than six. They continue to squeeze the number until the correct number is guessed. They don't even realize they are doing math when they play this "guessing" game! ;)

 Decorating Cookies works on decomposing five and ten. Mats and recording sheets for both numbers are included for differentiation. If students aren't ready for a number sentence to record the combinations, there is a recording sheet where they just fill in the color combinations too!

 Sweet Memory to work on number identification. 

 Finally, the Gingerbread Write the Room with two different recording sheets. On one sheet, the student is recording the number he counts on the ten frame and filling out the ten frame. On the other recording sheet, the student counts the number on the ten frame and counts on from that number. 

If you like what you see, you can get these stations for your classroom here. When we get back from winter break, we will be ready to start our winter math stations which you can get here. You can see a peek at the winter math stations on my blog from last year here. 

I hope you all have a wonderful end to the semester and a fabulous holiday season!! 

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Christmas Literacy Centers!

Here is our last set of literacy centers for the year. We decided to make them Christmas themed! J Basically every time we plan our literacy centers, we think about the skills we want to focus on and then we decide how we want the kids to practice. I know I haven’t shared every set of centers we’ve done, but sometimes we look up and get ideas from others and other times we create our own. It all depends on the time we have to put into it I guess or if we find what we want. This time, we created all of the centers to fit our kids and the skills we wanted to highlight.

The first three centers I created and you can get them here. My talented teaching partner created the last two, but I don’t think she has them posted in her store yet. If there is a lot of interest, I’m sure I could talk her into posting them! J

I got this magnet idea from the I Teach K conference this summer while attending one of the amazing Deanna Jump sessions. You can see a video of this in action either on my Instagram or Facebook page to get a better idea. This one is called Santa's Swipe & Write because the students put a counter down for each sound in the word, swipe it with the magnetic wand as they say the word, and then they write each sound. Great practice and engaging! You don't have to use the magnetic counters and wand, but it sure makes it fun! You could have them use any type of manipulative to sound out the word. 

The next one is the North Pole Write the Room. I can't say how much our kids LOVE write the room centers and how well they do with them!! We always try to make this one of our centers. For literacy centers, we try to use about 12 words and then have an activity for them to do on the back of the page when they finish. Typically it's drawing a picture using the words they found around the room and labeling them. 

One of the skills we have begun working on is ending sounds, so this next center was great practice! We do so much focusing on the beginning sound for so long it seems that sometimes transitioning to the ending sound can be tricky. They got the hang of it though even if it just required a few reminders. 

For the last two, we worked on sight words and making sentences. This is the Reindeer Food Roll & Write. They rolled the dice, wrote/spelled the corresponding word on the paper, and then wrote the word in the reindeer food. Great practice when done right! J

 

 This is Santa's Scramble where the students had to cut out the words in the sentence, unscramble them to build the sentence, and then write it. This included sight words we have learned along with Christmas picture words.

 

When we come back from break, we plan to do some review with beginning sounds, rhyming, and stretching out words. This will probably be the last literacy center post from me for a while because the hubby and I are just 2 weeks away from our baby boy's due date! I won't be returning to school until probably mid-February. Wish us luck with our first little babe! We are so excited...and maybe a wee bit nervous!!! J

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Literacy Centers: Beginning Sounds, Rhyming, CVC Words, & MORE!

Here for another round of literacy centers! We are working on beginning sounds, CVC words, and rhyming lately. The kids are getting lots of great practice and it's so exciting to see the improvement from the beginning of these centers to now. 

First is our Three in a Row game. This game can be played individually or with a partner. I printed out the partner version, but we ended up playing it individually this time around. That's why you see the two squares at the bottom because it comes with blue letters and pink letters for the two players. We decided to use some magnetic letters this time around and play individually. The students draw a magnetic letter and if there is a picture that begins with that sound, they get to cover it. Once they get three in a row, they win and play with a new game card. It's great practice for those beginning sounds.

Another beginning sound center we are working on is Say it, Clip it! They choose five cards at a time and clip the beginning sound of each, check it with a teacher or friend, and then choose five more. They are getting really good at their beginning sounds!! Say it, Clip it and Three in a Row are also found in my Beginning Sounds Literacy Centers BUNDLE.

 Next up is our write the room that goes with our unit theme right now - nutrition! We have done a couple other write the room activities with Halloween words and fall words too. 

After the kids found and wrote all the food words, they got to make their own healthy lunch tray full of the foods they found around the room and label them. This is a center that NEVER gets old with my kids and I never have to worry about them staying on task and engaged in the activity. LOVE IT!!

 I LOVE the practice my kids are getting from this next one. We talk so much about stretching and writing words and this has been a tremendous help for my students and making sure they stretch and hear every sound in the words. We have done mixed vowel CVC words and we've also focused on a specific vowel such as /u/ and /e/ because our students need more work with those. These are made by my teaching partner, Jennifer Brown, and you can get them here.

 The last one is to practice rhyming with my Rhyme Time cut/paste worksheet. Rhyming has been tricky for a lot of our kids and this has been very helpful practice for them. We've done a few different versions of these as well, but having all the options in front of them has been helpful for them to hear the rhymes and really check their work. The extra cutting, gluing, and coloring practice has been nice too! ;) 

Next week we plan to bring in some Thanksgiving centers for our kinders. Only a week and a half left before Thanksgiving break! CRAZY!!! Have a good one!

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Fall Math Stations!

Our fall math stations are in full swing! I feel like I say this every time, but I LOVE this time of independent math practice during our day!! Check out what we've been working on...

A fall friendly shake and spill to make five.

 Scarecrow ten frame and number match.

 Greater than, less than, and equal to card game with a fun twist! 

 Draw, write, and make the number on a ten frame. This one also has a recording sheet for stamping instead of the ten frame, but we wanted to do all laminated sheets this year to avoid making so many copies!

 Flat and solid shape sort. It was so fun to hear them sorting today as they said aloud flat or solid for each picture. 

 Sorting silly fall leaves by shape and size.

 Working on greater than, less than, and equal to with this hiding fall mouse game. One player hides as the other one puts the fall mouse behind a number. 

 Then the player that was hiding, comes back around and asks questions like, is it greater than five? Is it less than three? 

 They narrow it down until they figure out which number the mouse is hiding behind.

 Autumn roll and cover. This can be played individually or with a partner. I played this today with one of my students and we had so much fun! I love the little leaf manipulatives. I scored those at Target last year in the dollar spot. Not sure if they have them again this year or not. 

 We always love our write the room station! Two different recording sheets go with this one. Either just writing the amount or writing the amount along with the number that comes before and after. 

These are all included in my Fall Math Stations pack along with a few more!! There are 12 stations total and they are all aligned to the Common Core! If you already have these, you will want to download the updated version for some additional recording sheets. I've found that laminating the recording sheets works so much better for us instead of making so many copies, so if you would rather have those, they are now included!

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Shape Monsters & Word Family Spiders

Halloween is quickly approaching and we just finished a full week of conferences. Today I got to enjoy a day off from school which was much needed! I got to sleep in a bit, go to the doctor to check on our baby, grocery shop, clean house, and now I'm finally taking time to relax before the Royals play tonight! As I sit here relaxing, I thought I would share our hallway display during conferences because it turned out too cute!  J     

The first activity we did was a Shape Monster Glyph. I love how colorful and different they all look. The bright colors outside our classroom door just make me so happy! J  It fit in perfectly with our unit about shapes in math. Then I thought it would be a fun display if we made the bulletin board interactive for the parents as they come to conferences. The glyph guidelines were posted so that they could guess which monster belonged to their child. Then they could check their guess by lifting the question mark that covers the students' pictures. All of this can be found in my store so that you can make your own monster glyphs and an interactive board if you'd like! 

 The next activity was a word family spider. We did the -at word family. You can download this freebie here. On each of the legs, the students glued an -at family picture and wrote the word for the picture using construction paper crayons. They turned out pretty cute and the kids loved seeing them hanging in the hallway since there is never anything hanging outside our door.

Can you believe Halloween is this Friday?! At least it's on a Friday this year!! Crazy to think that November is right around the corner. I couldn't be more excited though because that means our baby boy is almost here!! Only 9.5 more weeks to go before the due date! 

Enjoy your weekend and have a fabulous last week of October! J

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