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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