Favorite center activity (k-2 teachers)

Looking for some new ideas to do with my 1st graders. TIA! My kids love the overhead projector center and the art center which changes weekly.

Re: Favorite center activity (k-2 teachers)

I teach first grade also. One center my kids love is the word wall center. They have a few activities to choose from. One is "how much is my word" I have a bin of scrabble tiles and the make words from the wall then add up how much it is. Another one is "sign my word". I have a whole bunch of the manual sign language alphabet run off and the kids spell the word wall words by signing them. They can work with partners and guess what words they are signing. The next one is a dice word wall game. The kids get a paper with the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 at the top of columns. The kids take turn rolling the die and they have to find a word on the wall with the same amount of letters that they rolled and record it on the paper. The last one is "making words". The kids have to make as many words as they can using the letters from a bigger word. For example, this week's word is St. Patrick's day. I will have the big word spelled out in magnetic letters so they can use them to help make the smaller words.

Hope that helps, I am always looking for new center ideas so if you have any please share too!

Re: Favorite center activity (k-2 teachers)

Awesome word wall ideas. Thanks!! I actually just made a word wall bingo center today which was a hit with the kids. I'll def incorporate some of your ideas!

We also do the magnet letter words (ours is also St. Patrick's Day this week).

A favorite is the "technology center. We have 3 computers in the room so half of each team goes there to do an activity/game of some sort and the rest go to the overhead center. There they build words, do pattern block pictures, etc. Then they switch.

We do poetry center with our poem of the week. The teams read it, mix it, fix it and glue a small version into their poetry book and illustrate it.

We have a silly/serious sentence center where on some sentence strips there are sentence starters and others where there are endings. The kids spread them out on the mat and choose 1 beginning & 1 ending. They put it together, tell their team if it is serious or silly and read it aloud to them. They love this.

We have a nonfiction center where the kids read a nonfiction book of choice and then can choose to make a list of facts they learned, make a web or fill out a sheet pertaining to nonfiction books.

Write around the room is always fun. The kids walk around with a pencil, paper and clip board and search the room for certain types of words for that week (maybe by syllable or # of letters, etc).

I'll add more as I think of them