How to Effectively Manage Kindergarten Math Centers ~ Ep. 71

Centers are the perfect way to help students practice the math skills that you are teaching them. They are developmentally appropriate. They are hands on engaging when you have choice to them, whether the kids are choosing, how long they’re staying, which center they’re going to, what they’re doing there.

Zeba from Episode 71 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast

Episode Summary

This episode explores effective management of math centers in kindergarten classrooms, and the importance of hands-on, playful environments for engaging early math instruction. I outline the ideal structure for a math block, which involves a mini-lesson followed by interactive activities that replace traditional worksheets. Practical tips for organizing centers, rotation methods, and maintaining student engagement are shared, along with the significance of student choice in fostering autonomy. The episode also highlights the need for clear expectations and routines to maximize learning, alongside strategies for targeted intervention and assessment. This episode serves as a guide for kindergarten teachers aiming to create vibrant and effective math learning experiences.

In this episode I share:

• The Importance of Hands-On Learning and Centers
• Center Rotation Strategies
• Managing Center Engagement
• Small Groups and Assessments

Previous Episodes:

• Essential Math Skills Every Kindergartener Needs ~ Ep. 66
• How to Best Manage Centers as a Classroom Teacher: Part 2 of a Conversation with a First-Year Teacher – Ep. 16

Related Blog Posts:

• How to Structure a Kindergarten Math Lesson

Resources Mentioned:

• Workshop: Literacy, Math, and Centers… Oh My!

Get the bundle to save big: 

• Kindergarten Math for the WHOLE YEAR | Math Games, Centers, and Small Groups

Learn More With a Free Math Workshop

Connect with Zeba:

• Instagram – @kindergartencafe
• Facebook – @kindergartencafe
• Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
• Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe

Read the Transcript

[0:00] Hey, teacher friends. Today we’re doing our last sort of mini math series episode all about managing math centers. So I’ve been talking a lot in the last few episodes about how hands-on playful learning is best for practicing the math skills that we’re doing, and we do that with math centers. So how do we manage centers? How do we set it up? Let’s talk all about it.

[0:27] Music. You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing. Music.

[1:21] All right, so as I’ve said, math centers are just like the best way for kids to practice what you’re teaching them. They are hands-on. There can be an element of choice that can be very engaging for kids. But I know that many teachers struggle with the management aspect because not all the kids are doing the same thing at the same time. It can be difficult to make sure that everyone’s engaged and everyone is working on what they should be doing and doing it the right way. So let’s talk about how to manage those math centers.

[1:52] Well, first, when we’re thinking of where do the math centers fit in in our day with math, this is the structure that I like for math, where we have a whole group lesson that starts the math block, sets the tone for the day, gives a little teaching point. Maybe you have a way for kids to practice that teaching point, whole class. After that mini lesson, then we move on to centers. I personally think that the bulk of our lesson time should be centers. It’s not always possible within our curriculums, I understand, but at least some part of the day should have math centers. And what I mean by math centers are hands-on activities for kids to practice what you’re teaching. They’re interactive. They are usually game-like or games for kids to play with. They usually involve concrete objects like counters for them to sort or count, cubes, dice, chips, all of that. I don’t believe centers should be worksheets. They should be playful learning, games, hands-on activities.

[3:06] How do we decide the number of centers? Well, for me, I base it on the number of tables I have. Each table is a center. So I have five tables. I have five centers. I’ve always done it that way. There are lots and lots of ways to do math centers. Some people set it up where the kids go to a bin. They take out the center activity from the bin. They bring it to their table spot. I actually tried it that way one year and I just hated it I hated the management of it it didn’t work for me I didn’t like that I felt like I had to have a whole class set of things when if you do it at the table you only have to have the number of seats at a table so like four or five of the game or whatever I felt like it was easier to manage of like all the materials that the kids would need for the different games like if they needed dice and chips it was all in the table bin versus they had to go get the dice and the chips. So there’s lots of different ways, but I’m going to tell you how I do it. So like I said, the number of centers was decided because I had five tables, so I had five centers.

[4:10] I do the centers. I decide what they are based on the learning goal of the unit that we’re in. I find games related to that, or the curriculum has games related to that, or I’ve made my own games related to that skill that I know will be helpful to my students. Again, I know some people plan centers where like they have one center that’s on numbers and one center that’s all on adding and one center that’s all on data and one that’s on i don’t even know but like each center has a structure to it i that didn’t work for me because it took me so long just i i did try it but it was like it was so hard for me to figure out which games would go in each category or if If I easily found three of the categories, then I’d go searching for two of the categories. And it would take so long just to find something just to fit in what I was looking for that I’d rather just pick five games and not force it to fit into any category. So to each their own. But that’s that’s how I chose that and why that worked for me.

[5:13] Now let’s talk about center rotation. So again, lots of ways to do this. I’ve tried where you have kids assigned to a center and you rotate out every 10 minutes or whatever, five minutes, and they move through all the centers in the week. That did not work for me. I liked having the control to make sure that each kid went to each center and like having the group set for the centers. And I was actually challenged to try it where the kids were free-flowing between the centers. And I thought, no way, that can’t work. But I tried it. I was open and I tried it. And I loved it so much that I never went back ever. And now I do my literacy centers that way, too. Because the engagement that you get from kids being able to choose their centers is huge. If I was telling them after 10 minutes, okay, time to go to the next center, what if they’re still so engaged at that one center? I don’t want to interrupt that. That’s where the best learning is coming from. So I don’t want to interrupt that. I want them to be able to keep going. If they literally want to sit at one center for the entire center time, and I’ve had kids do this, that’s like 40 minutes sometimes of them doing the same activity. That’s pretty much unheard of with kids’ attention span.

[6:33] So if they’re that engaged where they are wanting to stay and do it the whole time, let’s let them do that. And when they’re able to choose which center to go or when they’re ready to move on, they’re going to be more engaged. They’re going to get more out of that center than if I said, okay, now you got to move on to this. And just all the transitions of that too of like, okay, set it up and now you’ve got two minutes to play. Okay, time to move on, clean it up. So many transitions, transitions, causes behavior that you don’t, you don’t need to have, you don’t need to deal with. You can avoid all that simply by letting kids transition when they’re ready to transition.

[7:09] Now, a couple pushbacks on that. Well, how do you make sure that everyone gets to every center? Well, one of the ways that I do that is having the kids sign out with a sign out sheet. So when they’ve gone to that center, they know they have to find their name and sign their name next to it. So I know they’ve been to that center once. Then they can go to any other center they haven’t been to yet. And once they’ve been to all five centers, then they can go back to any of the centers they liked and they want to go back to, right? Because as long as they’ve done everything once, fine, they can go back to another one that they love. Now, my new curriculum actually has the centers as extra practice. And so they don’t actually care if the kids go to the center or not, because you’ve done it whole class and they have lots of ways. This is just one additional way to practice. So I don’t keep track anymore. And that’s kind of nice. But when I was keeping track, It was super easy. You just have to teach the routine of signing out and then reinforce and praise that, oh, so-and-so signed out, then they moved on to the next center. So I know they went here. Or you can look at the list and say, OK, these three students haven’t done the center. We’re going to start with you. And then the kids will be like, well, I did it. I’m like, well, you didn’t sign out. So you have to come do it and then make sure you sign out. Now, how do we make sure that the kids are doing the centers the right way and not just coming and saying they did it and leaving?

[8:33] So when I introduce the center, I teach my students the expectation of you need to do at least three of these or you need to do the whole page before you can move on. Can you do more than that? Yes, absolutely. But you need to do at least three. And so I make sure to explain that every time I’m introducing the center so they know what the minimum is for them to do before they can move on. But then I also do a lot of teaching into recognizing when they’re ready to move on. So if I see them starting to act silly at a center or use it as a toy and not a tool or distracting others, I’ll say, you know, you’re distracting the other kids at the table when you touch their boards and you talk to them about stuff that aren’t math. I think you’re ready to move on to another center, make another choice. So I say like, hey, your body’s showing me that you’re ready to move on. You can move on. and just simply allowing them to change up the activity they’re doing usually solves all the misbehagures. Not always, but usually.

[9:38] Because they’re able to have that choice and be engaged, right? If they’re just getting bored, that’s when misbehaviors happen. So when we can help them move on and find a new engaging activity, misbehaviors go away. Like with anything, these routines have to be taught and modeled and practiced, and you have to break it into part by part when you’re introducing it. So I introduce one center at a time, then I add a second one, and they practice moving between the two, then I introduce third and the fourth and then we make sure that we practice and reinforce the expectations on cleaning up before you go and anytime I see a kid doing that I even now in the winter I’ll say you know wow so-and-so cleaned up the whole center before they left they moved on that’s so great now everyone whoever comes there next is ready to go that is a key component of managing centers is that you model, you break it down step by step, you practice, but then you keep reinforcing it when you’re seeing what you want the kids to be doing. And that’s the thing we forget. We forget to reinforce because if they’re doing it, you know, it’s more obvious when they’re not doing it. But we need to remember, I need to remember to constantly be shouting out the things that we want kids to be doing, that they are already doing.

[10:56] One other reason that I like centers is it’s super easy to pull kids into small groups while kids are working in centers. And so that’s when you could do some intervention time, small group time. You can really target some more specific skills. You can also sit with kids while they’re doing centers. And if you know that there’s a game that would really help them work on a skill they’re struggling with, sit with them and help them through it. You can sort of teach into that activity instead of pulling a whole separate small group, but that can be a good way to utilize everyone’s time.

[11:29] Centres are also a great time to work on assessing kids. You can pull them one-on-one. Other kids are highly engaged. They don’t need you. Once you’ve gone over the routines, they’ve learned them well, they should be able to do them on their own. And so you can pull kids one-on-one to do an assessment to check in with them on how they’re progressing on a certain skill or, like I said, pulling groups. So centers is a great time for managing all of those needs of the classroom. And I think, you know, if you’re noticing that lots of kids are going to a center and misbehaving at a center, then I wonder, has that center been there for a long time? Are they getting bored? Do we need to change up the center? Sometimes simply changing up the center, do a different activity, different game, keeps them highly engaged. Anytime you have something new, they’re engaged, then they won’t be misbehaving. So to recap, centers are the perfect way to help students practice the math skills that you were teaching them, they are developmentally appropriate,

[12:29] they are hands-on, engaging. When you have choice to them, whether the kids are choosing how long they’re staying, which center they’re going to, what they’re doing there, when you have some kind of choice in the center, then the kids are more engaged and you’re not going to miss behaviors, which means you can pull kids for small groups, interventions, assessments, and really use the math block really effectively.

[12:54] So if you have more pushback on choice-based centers or, you know, things that people will say about it, please let me know. I thought I addressed all of the common concerns with letting kids choose the centers, but happy to do a follow-up episode. You can send me a DM with centers as the code word and let me know if you liked

[13:16] it, if you want to try it, if you have other pushback that I should address, let me know. And our quote of the day, I asked a boy, five-year-old, like what he was doing. You know, he was kind of wandering around the room. And he said, well, I was pooping, so I missed everything. And that is why centers are so important. Because even if they missed the whole lesson, because they’re pooping the whole time, they have plenty of time to still practice and still learn in centers. Bit of a stretch. But I love that quote. I was pooping. I missed it. Fair enough. Fair enough. You missed it. Anyway, hope you liked the episode and hope you liked this whole series on math and we’ll see you in the next episode.

[14:00] Music. Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you’ve liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then.