Take a tour of my kindergarten building center. Get ideas for materials, activities and set-up to see how you can put together your own building center for your students.
I changed up our building center this year so that students have a bit more room to build, and they have space to leave their works in progress up. They have been loving this new space, and it’s been so great to see them creating and enjoying the space.
To hear me talk about this center, you can listen to this podcast episode.
Here is a quick tour of our Construction Site:
Construction Materials
Our students are free to choose which materials they would like to use in their project (within reason- we don’t want them dumping out everything). I made labels for the drawers that they can use and made all the construction materials easy for them to take out and put away.
Building Blocks
I love having a variety of materials available for the students to use, but everything is always so expensive, and we have such a limited budget! So I have been working on making different blocks myself (with the help of my SO!) So far I have made wooden gems, colourful blocks, and wood-burned blocks. I am always looking for some new ideas on what I can add.
Shelves
Another area that students are free to explore is our shelves. There are different materials that they can use, and it has a good variety of materials.
Class Blueprints
We encourage our students to write about their creations, and they can add pictures and their writing to our class book.
If this is something you would like to use with your class, you can download the template for free from here:
Need more ideas for your construction site? Take a look at this past blog post: A Tour of our Construction Site.
Buildings Around the World
To give my students some inspiration while building, I created this Buildings Around the World book. It has images of different buildings and where they are from so that my students can look through it and learn more about different places.
It is a great way to get students wondering about the world, and starting conversations about different countries.
So far I have included 25 different buildings and I hope to add more as my students show interest in different areas, or I learn more about where my students are from.
I’ve added the download for this file in my Resource Library as a freebie! Let me know in the comments if there are any other buildings I should add!
What have you included in your building center?
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Hi Amanda,
Went to the post cannot find link to download the page for kids to draw their plans.
Thank you.
Sent from my iPhone
Hi Karima! I have added the free download to this blog post! Thanks for pointing this out 🙂
Amanda
What a beautiful classroom you have! I absolutely love the wooden blocks you made! How did you learn to do that? They are so creative, attractive and I bet your students love them too? Thanks so much for sharing great ideas!
I didn’t really learn… I just tried it out and it worked! Thank you so much for your kind words 🙂
Oh awesome! That gives me hope for myself! Haha!
I love how the planning sheet encourages students to put their ideas onto paper and think through a plan, test it and then possibly revise! When I click on the resource library, I do not have access to the buildings book, could you please help?
Hi Sarah,
You receive the password for my Resource Library when you sign up for my newsletter!
Amanda
creativekindergarten@hotmail.com