Beginning Of The Year Center Activities

So you have your center management system in place. It’s the second week of school & you’re ready to start centers (yes we start on week 2), but what activities do you put in your tubs/bins/centers? This post shows you the activities we use at the beginning of the year! Not only are we learning how to do centers, and learning academic skills but we’re learning how to use the various types of center activities that we use in all of our TKS centers activities! This means, that when I introduce new skills, the activities are pretty much the same! This eliminates the need for introducing the centers, I simply add a new skill but the activities stay the same! If you use TKS center activities, you can do the same thing!!

For more information on how I introduce centers, manage centers and more, see the links at the end of this post.

What Types Of Activities And Games Do You Use At The Beginning Of The Year?

• matching (letters, numbers, counting)
• puzzles (letters, numbers, counting)
• spinners (letters, numbers)

The beginning of the year activities are simple and involve students matching uppercase to uppercase letters, lowercase to lowercase letters, numbers to numbers, etc. These are simple and can be done with little support. For students who are ready for a bit more challenge, we can include some counting activities, beginning sounds, and uppercase and lowercase letter matching! To achieve this simplicity, we just print double sets! So if we want a number matching game, we print two sets of the number cards! That’s the beauty of TKS centers: they’re low prep and are flexible so you can make the activities work in multiple ways so 1 activity can be two or three or four different activities!

The pictures below are the actual activities included in the tubs. The picture is followed by the link to the creation/product that contains that particular activity/activities (and more).

All of these resources are linked to our TKS Store but they are also available on TeachersPayTeachers. To find them on TPT, simply search by the name exactly as listed on the title pages seen below.

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We also have some Melissa and Dough puzzles that we include in our tubs!

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We introduce Write The Room in Week 3!

Learn more about write the room by clicking the image below:

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For more information about centers, check out these posts: