Math Stations

I've found that when I do math in the afternoons,  I love having a variety of activities laid out for students to pick from.  We will start with a whole class mini lesson for about 15 minutes, then do a quick whole class activity that covers what we talked about.  After the kids finish their whole class activity, they are able to choose from about 6 stations that I've laid out around the room.  The reason why this works so good for my class, is that my early finishers are never bored.  Once they finish their work, they can go straight to more activities (which are differentiated to ability levels).  It also gives me more time to work with students who need a little extra attention to grasp understanding of the concept.  Here are a few stations I laid out the other day! I've been reading the book Math Work Stations: Independent Learning You Can Count On, K-2 to get more ideas for math stations that students are able to do on their own, are fun, and help further their learning.

These are called Hot Dots! Students answer the problem, press their answer with the pen and it lets them know if its correct. 

We use these bead counters with lots of addition activities, including addition Hot Dots.  Students move the correct number of beads according to the problem and then count what's in the middle to find the answer.  For example with 2 + 3 they would move 2 orange and 3 white to the middle and count them all. 

For this stations, I set out a few different manipulatives.  For this day, we were working on adding and subtracting fluently to 6.  They show a problem that equals six with manipulatives, then write their problem on the chart with the corresponding markers.  I love this because if adding or subtracting two numbers is too easy, then can move onto 3 numbers or larger numbers.   

The most important part of math stations, according to Debbie Diller is math talk.  You can include math talk cards for students to use during stations.  Here is an example of station directions and math talk prompting!