May-Themed Math and Literacy Centers for First Grade

Depending on where you teach, May might be your last month of school! Or it might be the long month leading up to your last month of school. Our last day of school is in May, so we spend the month packing up the classroom and celebrating the end of the year, all while continuing to make learning meaningful for our students. This can be done with our engaging May-themed Math and Literacy Centers for First Graders, designed to help them develop essential skills while enjoying seasonal activities.

During May, we help our students celebrate their mothers, or other important women in their lives, with activities such as this Mother’s Day flower gift. We read our stack of books all about Mother’s Day and even make a sweet I love Mom thumbprint craft.

We use spring-themed activities like these time clock puzzles to keep our students busy. To reinforce our math skills, we practice addition with these frog puzzles and work on both subtraction and addition with our sunflower math activity. We dive deeper into the month with our May science experiments and these spring books. 

Since it’s the end of the school year, we are always looking for ways to keep our students practicing and reviewing the skills that they’ve been learning all year. I use this May Literacy Journal and this May Math Journal, both made for first grade, to help my students show what they know. 

If you’re looking for a guaranteed way for your students to practice their previously learned skills, these May-Themed Math and Literacy Centers for First Grade are your best bet. These May centers will not only keep your students busy while you pack up your classroom, but they’ll also be having so much fun that they won’t even realize they’re learning. These centers will be a fantastic addition to your May curriculum for first grade! 

First Grade May-Themed Math and Literacy Centers

This bundle comes with 40 first grade May-themed centers to use with your students this spring to help them practice math and literacy skills. With fun, spring-themed clipart featuring bugs, cute animals, flowers, and even beach items, you can end the school year and welcome summer in style. 

These first grade May learning centers can be used in your math and literacy stations or centers, as whole group lessons, or even as small group review. Some teachers use the different types of centers for different purposes. The materials can be used as morning work, early finisher work, or even homework. These spring educational activities are also available in bundles for kindergarten and pre-k, so if you’re looking for easy differentiation options, you’ll definitely want to check those out too! 

The First Grade May Learning Centers Include:

4 weeks of May Math Centers for First Grade

• Puzzles and Match-Ups for Math
• Write the Room Math Activities
• Write & Wipe Centers
• Partner Games for First Graders
• Games to Play with Dice

4 Weeks of First Grade May Literacy Centers

• Writing Centers
• Write the Room Literacy Centers
• Write & Wipe and Puzzles
• Match-Ups and Pocket Chart Activities
• Poetry Centers 

The May Math Activities cover these skills:

• Place Value, Graphing, Expanded Notation, Fractions, Subtraction, Addition, Word Problems, 10 More/10 Less, Decomposing Numbers, Comparing Numbers, Coins, Skip Counting, Number Order…and more!

The May Literacy Printables cover these skills:

• Poetry, Writing, Sequencing, Sight Words, Phonemes, Digraphs, Blends, Word Families, Contractions, R-Controlled Vowels, Trigraphs, Vowel Teams…and more!

Using the May Centers

This collection of spring math and literacy activities for first grade comes with 40 centers to use with your students this May. Forty centers might sound overwhelming at first, so let me share some of our favorite tips for using these spring educational resources with your students. 

• After you purchase and download the centers, take inventory on what you have. Look at the different types of centers and the various centers of each type. Make a list, if not printing right away, of which centers you want to print out. 
• Make a plan of what needs to be printed, copied, laminated, and cut. Figure out which centers can be made reusable so that they don’t need to be prepped again every year.
• Decide how you’ll use and introduce the centers. Maybe you will show students one version of each type of center a week. Or maybe you’ll decide to use some centers as other types of activities. Remember, there is no “right” way to use these, make the first grade May learning centers work for you!
• Remember to model each center for your students and to set clear and concise expectations for what you expect from them during center time. These activities are repetitive and your students will become more independent after doing them a few times.

Suggested Materials 

• Copy Paper
• Laminating Sheets
• Dice
• Dry Erase Markers
• Erasers
• Write the Room Clips

May Math Centers for First Grade

Write the Room Math Activities

Write the room activities are a fun way to get your first graders out of their seats and moving while learning this spring. With four different activities, all with differentiated recording sheets, your students can practice addition, word problems, subtraction, and number order with these May math centers for first grade.

Write & Wipe Centers

Write and wipe centers can be laminated or put in page protectors and used with dry-erase markers over and over again. These four May math activities will help students practice several important math skills, including comparing numerals using the correct symbols, counting nickels, pennies, dimes, and quarters, skip counting by 5, 10s, and 2s, and telling time to the hour and half hour. 

Dice Games for May

If you’re looking for some hands-on May math games for first graders, look no further than these dice games. With simple-to-follow instructions, these dice games provide students with the opportunity to review their math skills while playing games. The May dice games cover skills including adding with teen numbers, graphing, and subtraction within 20. Students can even play a “roll a flower” game where they will build their own flower. 

Games for First Graders to Play with Partners

My students LOVE getting to play games with their classmates, and I enjoy encouraging them to practice not only their math skills, but also their social skills. Your students will have a blast playing a decomposing board game, 10 more/10 less spinner game, tens and ones “Go Fish” game, and a race to 20 game. These games will help your students practice their addition and subtraction strategies, all while having a blast playing with friends.

Math Puzzles and Match-Ups

Puzzles and match-ups are easy centers to pull out when you need something quick and simple for your students to do. This type of center is also good for early finisher work. The May centers come with two math puzzles, one practicing subtraction word problems and the other bar graphs, and two match-up activities practicing expanded notation and fractions. These May math centers for first grade are just what you need to make the end of the school year exciting and engaging! 

May Literacy Centers for First Grade

Poems and Poetry Center Materials

You will love the four poems that come in the May literacy centers! One poem is for Mother’s Day and would even make a great add-on to a Mother’s Day gift. The other two original poems are about May and spring and are filled with the most adorable clipart. The last poem is a classic, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and students will learn a lot working with this nursery rhyme. Each poem comes with pocket chart activities, a poetry journal, and a poetry notebook, giving you several May reading activities for first grade to work with. 

Literacy Write the Room Centers

With May being so close to the end of the year, it’s pretty typical for our kids to be climbing the walls by the middle of the month. How can we combat this urge to wiggle and move? By letting them move while they learn with these interactive literacy write the room centers! Your first graders can practice contractions, r-controlled vowels, vowel teams, and trigraphs/3-letter blends with these May literacy centers.

Match-Ups and Pocket Chart Activities

Match-up activities and pocket chart activities can be used in multiple different ways. You can spread out the pieces in a pocket chart, on a table, on the floor, or anywhere that allows room. Students can use the “How to Build a Sandcastle” sequencing activity to show what they know about retelling and sentence structure. For more first grade May sentence structure activities, the sentence scramble activity in this pack of centers gives students the chance to build sentences in a hands-on way, while also recording them down on paper to practice their writing skills. The other two centers in this category include a phoneme sort and an editable sight word hide and seek activity, allowing you to differentiate to meet the needs of your students this May. 

Writing Centers for May

With four different sets of writing cards and differentiated writing materials, these first grade May writing centers will keep your students engaged and using their imaginations all month long. Students can explore drawing and writing about dinosaurs, the ocean, space, and the zoo. Students can use the writing papers to show off all the writing skills that they’ve worked so hard on during their year in first grade.

Literacy Write & Wipe Activities and Puzzles

The literacy write and wipe activities and puzzles that come in these May math and literacy centers are easy-to-prep additions to your May lessons. Your students can practice changing the ending sound in words to create new words, working with word families, and ending and beginning digraphs and blends with these spring-themed literacy centers for first grade.

Download the May-themed Math and Literacy Centers for First Grade Now!

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Explore these interactive May Math and Literacy Centers for First Grade, featuring hands-on activities that reinforce key concepts with an exciting spring theme!

Want more monthly-themed math and literacy centers for first grade?

You and your students will love using these May-themed math and literacy activities for first grade all the way until the end of the year!