Literacy Centers for Kindergarten (and great for first grade too!)

Hi everyone! Since I'm in school mode, I'm looking forward. I had a lot of requests over the past year to start making kindergarten literacy menus. I studied the common core standards, talked to a few kinder teachers, thought back to my days when I taught kinders in a pull out setting, and practiced on my son. I'm a little nervous to post since I'm not a kindergarten teacher, but I think they will work well. I want to preface by saying that center in september for kinders can be tough. They are just starting school and you have some that are ready to get going and others that maybe don't have any clue how to hold a pencil! So, these centers can be used in small group setting if your class isn't ready for centers. 

For August starters, these are even better because your students  will already have been in school for a little while before introducing these. For September starters, you might use these differently. I would use these as an introduction to centers for my students. You want your students to be trained how to do centers and use this menu for later on in the year. I would use this to walk them through the process. You could even just use these for small group activities too. Ideally, you would have yourself, two parent helpers and a teaching aide. Ha! In a perfect world! 

I actually have been using these with my son, who's going into pre-k. He loves doing them! They've been great one-on-one activities for us to do together. Here are some pictures of the centers in action:

Match picture to letter (initial sounds)

Letter Bus: matching different fonts of the same letters

Matching upper case and lower case letters

 

Rhyme Match up: 

Side note: I was surprised at how hard this was! We've actually done this a couple times together. I guide him along and it's getting better!

Where's the Sound: 

Deciding if the /t/ sound comes at the beginning or the end of the word

Syllable Sort

A second option for a worksheet: cutting and pasting

Flip a Word: 

color in the pictures as you make the words

This is his favorite! He wants to do a few words every evening before bed. So cute! 

Fill a word: 

Adding the first initial consonant to the words

Word Sort: 

sorting word families

with two worksheet options

That was tough, so I made another option for this center: word or letter sort

And of course there is a kinder menu with the common core standards included on it:

I chose to do two because I thought, for most kinders in September, 9 centers would be plenty. I wanted to give the other option of 12 centers because there are some kinders who might be ready for the challenge. The smaller menu doesn't have the word work section since that one is all about sounding out words. 

Notice the headings are different than the 1st and 2nd grade menus. For September through November (or December-haven't decided yet) the menu will be:

~letter work

~Writing

~Word Sounds 

~Word Work

Then for the rest of the year the headings will be the same as 1st and 2nd:

~word work

~reading

~writing

~sentence building

Here's what is included:

You can get this at my stores:

     

PS. These would be great for some first graders too! I think there are MANY MANY firsties who could use these instead of the more challenging first grade centers. You could really differentiate with the kinder, first, and second menus. Just saying:)