Are you looking for a way to bring some summer fun and engagement to your classroom at the end of the school year? Your centers routine can be a great place to start! In this post, I’m sharing some fun summer centers for kindergarten. You can use these hands-on activities to bring some extra engagement to your daily routine at the end of the year.
5 Ways to Use Summer Centers
There are many different reasons why it’s helpful to add some summer center activities to your lesson plans for May. Here are just a few:
1. Maintain Routine
As we inch closer to the end of the year, it can become harder and harder to maintain consistency and routine in the classroom. There are so many schedule interruptions in the last few weeks of the school year!!
You can use summer centers to keep your daily math and literacy stations going as long as possible. Your students will benefit from the consistency of maintaining the centers routine. The touch of summer fun will help to keep students on task during the daily routine.
2. Administer Assessments
With everything else going on at the end of the year, it’s possible that you might not be able to keep your regular centers routine up and running. If that’s the case, there are other ways that you can use these summer centers activities in your classroom!
For example, you can use summer-themed centers to keep your students engaged in meaningful tasks while you work with individual students on assessments. If you used centers during the year, your students will know how to work independently on these tasks.
3. Review Math and Literacy Skills
The end of the school year is a great time for our students to review what they’ve learned in kindergarten. This gives them a chance to sharpen their math and literacy skills before leaving for the summer. They can get a head start on avoiding the summer slump, which will help them be more prepared for first grade.
However, skill review can become repetitive for students, especially when they’re eager for the school year to be over. That’s why it is so helpful to bring some extra engagement with themed activities. These colorful summer centers can provide variety to this skill review.
4. End of the Year Party
Are you looking for a unique way to celebrate the end of the school year? You can incorporate summer-themed centers into your festivities! Just set up a few stations for students to rotate through during your end-of-the-year party. The summer-themed activities will help your students get excited about the upcoming break while celebrating everything they’ve learned during the year.
5. Summer School
Summer centers can also be a fun resource to use during summer school. If you’re teaching summer school this year, you can keep a few summer centers on hand to help students practice literacy and math. Students will be able to review important skills with a touch of seasonal engagement!
Summer Centers for Kindergarten
Regardless of how you choose to use these activities, your students will be engaged in worthwhile skill practice! Let’s take a look at some of the different skills that your students can practice with summer kindergarten centers.
Math Centers
By the end of the school year, your students have grown by leaps and bounds in their math knowledge! They’ll definitely be ready to review the skills they have learned.
Your students can review addition and subtraction with fun summer-themed activities. They can create a sun by matching the different equations that make a given number.
Students can also practice composing numbers by identifying how many seeds are missing from a watermelon.
By the end of the school year, your students will also be working hard on learning teen numbers. You can help them keep up the momentum with some summer-themed activities. In this surfing-themed center, students will match base ten blocks to teen numbers. This will help students visualize teen numbers!
Your students can also go hunting for seashells as they sort shapes! They will identify real-world objects as either 2D or 3D shapes and then sort them into the correct bucket.
Literacy Centers
You can also incorporate summer fun into literacy review for your students.
If your students could use some extra review with phonological awareness, they can complete this flip-flopping rhyme activity! They will use their rhyming knowledge to create matching flip-flop pairs.
They can also practice identifying beginning sounds with fun summer activities. In this literacy center, students will create sunglasses by matching each picture to its correct beginning sounds.
As students get ready for summer vacation, they can reflect on all of the hard work they’ve put into learning to read! Students can practice building words with either short vowel or long vowel sounds.
You can customize these activities to best meet the needs of your students. Either way, students will be excited to build and read so many words during these fun activities!
If your students need more practice with digraphs, this surfboard sorting activity is a great option! Students will identify the picture on each surfboard and then match it with the digraph that they hear in the word. They will either hear the digraph as a beginning sound or ending sound.
Printable Summer Centers for Kindergarten
Would you like to use these summer-themed centers in your classroom? You can find all of the activities pictured in this post (and more!) in one easy-to-download resource. These hands-on and engaging literacy and math activities will help you bring a touch of summer fun to your classroom.
If you’d like to take a closer look at everything included in this set of centers, you can find it in the A Spoonful of Learning shop or on TPT.
Save These Kindergarten Summer Centers
Be sure to save this post if you’d like to come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to quickly find these summer centers when you’re looking for a hands-on way to practice math and literacy skills.