Hey educational rock stars! I hope you are having a great start to March and are ready to rock more math and literacy centers for elementary classrooms. Every month, I like to switch my centers up so my students are never getting bored. The March math and literacy centers are in the store now. What do you get when you buy our math and literacy centers? I’m so glad you asked!
March Math and Literacy Centers for Elementary Overview
Whenever you buy the math and literacy centers for elementary from Farrah Henley Education, you are getting 10 math centers and 10 literacy centers (if you buy the bundle). In those purchased centers, you get a table of contents that list out all of the skills that are covered in that month. However, if you buy the whole year bundle, you’ll get every month of the math and literacy centers AND that includes a list of what is covered in what month. This is great for versatility in the classroom. Want a bonus? If holiday themes aren’t your thing, Volume 2 of the math and literacy centers are themed by ideas (like outer space) instead of by holiday. We have math and literacy centers for grades K-5 and each one has something special. Plus, exit slips are always included! Want to know more about each grade level? I know you do!
A Trip to the Carnival in Kindergarten
In Volume 2 of our math and literacy centers for elementary, March is all about the carnival theme! These cute centers will get your students excited about reinforcing and reviewing skills for kindergarten.
Kindergarten Literacy Centers
Reading is such an important skill students start to learn and develop throughout school, but a lot of that foundation comes in kindergarten. Our kindergarten centers help students learn what compound words are and include specific phonic practice, r-controlled words, as well! These practices are presented as fun games like “Vowel Balloons” to keep your students engaged. To practice reading, students have “Swinging Stories” that help them learn about story elements. The literacy center doesn’t stop there! There are writing skills practice, high frequency words, and collaborative time as well.
Kindergarten Math Centers
The kindergarten math centers focus on those high need math skills like counting, decomposing numbers, shapes, addition, comparing numbers, and more! Not only do your students get a lot of math, science can be involved too! One center activity asks students to classify objects which can help you blend math and science! There is some adding and subtracting. However, if you’re students don’t have the adding and subtracting skills down yet, you can always provide math manipulatives!
Play at the Carnival in First Grade
In first grade we are going to continue with that amazing carnival theme. The colors and the pictures are relatable and so fun for students to work with! Remember math and literacy centers for elementary are easy to differentiate for all learning levels.
First Grade Literacy Centers
Just like kindergarten, first grade is focusing on learning those phonic skills. In the March literacy center, first graders will work with vowel sounds that can be so tricky at first along with digraphs. Then they get to read and figure out who is talking? This is a great introduction to which “person” the story is in. Beyond reading, there are writing activities, reviewing what sentences are and aren’t, as well as collaborative time which is so important.
First Grade Math Centers
When we get into first grade math, we learn to one, two skip a few (at least we kind of do). Centers for first grade math focus on counting by ten, but we didn’t stop there. Students can work on graphing which is another great way to blend math and science! Beyond these fun content crossing activities, you get fractions, adding, subtracting, counting practice and more! There is so much your students can learn from this!
Second Grade Goes to the Carnival!
Keeping our theme of the carnival throughout the month of March can work well for you especially for differentiating. If you have second grade students who need a bit of help still, going back to kindergarten or first grade activities that are similar can help reinforce ideas at a level that is right for the student. By having the same theme, the student doesn’t feel “left out.”
Second Grade Literacy Centers
As always, we are going to be working on phonics. However, there is so much more! From learning about apostrophes in contractions, story elements, revising, singular versus plural nouns and more! When you start to build on a variety of skills and reinforce them in centers, students get a firm grasp on the concept and therefore can continue to grow the skill.
Second Grade Math Centers
Of course we are going to add and subtract with increasing intensity, but there’s more than that. With graphing, measuring, story problems, and money matters, your students are going to start learning real-life skills that are going to be important as they get older.
Go Outside with Third Grade Centers
Once we start getting into third, fourth, and fifth grade we like to change up the theme to be a bit more mature. As we all know, students are all about growing up too fast so it’s important that our themes reflect their age. Just as with the carnival theme, you can still differentiate between 3-5 grades easily.
Literacy Centers for Third Grade
We get a little bit deeper when we get into third grade and start focusing on writing and reading skills on a deeper level. Students start to write more narratives and learn more about synonyms and antonyms which can help them with their writing. Teaching explicit ideas like editing and revising on top of reinforcing sight words is incredibly useful.
Third Grade Math Centers
In this grade, we are still adding, but we’re going to start adding multiplication and division. This can be so hard to get into which is why we include multiplication tables. You are also going to learn more about measuring and money!
Catch Some Rays in Fourth Grade!
Sticking with the outdoor theme, fourth grade is going to build on those math and literacy skills!
Fourth Grade Literacy Centers
With the help of games and manipulatives, students are going to start to make some inferences. Now remember, whenever you are doing something in a center, it should not be new! Before putting the making inferences center out, make sure you have taught the skills. Beyond inference, students will dive deeper into the story and word choice by looking at figurative language by introducing similes and metaphors. There are still writing activities with narrative writing with an extra element that is super fun! In fourth grade, we are also learning more about grammar with progressive verbs and prepositional phrases.
Fourth Grade Math Centers
As always we want to compare numbers and keep reinforcing those basic math skills of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, but we don’t want to stop there! You want to introduce tables which can be another great way to blend math and science together. Tables are something we see in our science books so make sure you take the time to point out those tables before using this center activity. This is also true about reading bar graphs.
Finding Fun Outside with Fifth Grade
Fifth grade is finally here and while some may not think centers work in fifth grade, that’s simply not true! I taught fifth grade for a few years and my students loved doing centers. Not only does it get students up and moving, they get to focus on different activities which keeps them engaged.
Fifth Grade Literacy Centers
In this grade, we are going to focus on making inferences as well. We know that we are looking at similar skills in both fourth and fifth grade, but we make sure to switch out the material so it’s a little more difficult than it was in fourth grade. This can help with differentiation. With that being said, we are going to continue focusing on writing prompts but we add sensory details with visuals. We also learn more about verbs, idioms and more.
Math Centers in Fifth Grade
We move from solving to writing out our own expressions. This is so important as we continue to grow our math skills. In addition, we get more information on graphs and line graphs. As always with new ideas, we are going to be reinforcing the basics of math skills that we need to be successful throughout our math careers.
Math and literacy centers are so great for reinforcing content as well as reviewing content in a fun way that gets kids moving with your center rotations. You can purchase the centers month by month; however, the best deal is the bundle! If you like holiday themes, the Volume 1 centers are for you. If you don’t like having specific holiday themes, look into Volume 2 which has great themes but are not focused on specific holidays. Plus, you can get these centers in print and digital formats. Can you get any better than that? Centers are wonderful, fun learning tools that every classroom needs!
Until Next Time…
Keep Being Educational Rock Stars
