Managing Early Elementary Music Centers

Managing music centers may sound daunting and overwhelming – especially for younger kindergarten students. Personally, I was super nervous to try it! Especially with my difficult to manage classes. However, with enough teach and preparation – they have been a HUGE success in my classroom!

Here are a few helpful things I did to make kindergarten centers more manageable.

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Crowd Control

Pre-Arranged Groups

I arranged groups before beginning centers. My partners in crime can be purposefully separated. Students who would need more individualized attention (or were with an aid) can be put into the same groups. High achieving students can be placed in groups to be “leaders and helpers” when directions needed to be clarified or extra help may be needed.

Dot Stickers

Anyone who has ever ran kindergarten centers knows someone always gets lost. To help avoid this, I put a colored dot sticker* on each student’s hand before we started. It took just a few minutes to do and my wanderers were able to find their groups quickly if they went astray. I could also quickly look up from who I was helping to see if everyone was where they needed to be.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Almost an entirety of one class period was spent on teaching the students how to use kindergarten music centers. Each center was modeled for them, as was what the center was to look like when cleaned up. We practiced sitting around the hoop (or in front of the cone) until I gave the cue to begin. We simulated cleaning up when the clean up music was played and immediately standing by the colored cones to show me they were ready. They moved to the next center and we practiced again. This step will not need to be repeated as thoroughly next time we do centers.

I believe practicing was the biggest key to centers being a success!

Organization Tools

Hula-hoops and Cones

The boundaries for each center were marked off with cones*, and they were encouraged to have their own bubble within that space. Clear boundaries greatly reduced wandering! Another helpful organizational method is to place all materials for the center in hula-hoops with the expectation that all materials would be returned inside the hoop. The only center this proved a detriment was the listening center – so I modified that one. The cones still helped give a visual for where the headphones should be kept when not worn. They also give students a place to stand to indicate they are all cleaned up and ready to move to the next center.

Plastic Trays

If you’ve checked out My Favorite Things, you know how much I love using plastic trays to keep activities and papers organized. These work well if storing hula hoops aren’t practical – or put them inside the hula hoops! Even better – they are easy to coordinate with your cones and hoops! (And it makes YOUR clean up easier, too!)

Time Management

While we do music centers, I help students be responsible with their time and center clean up with countdown timers. I use timers that have a clear signal to clean up along with a musical 2 minute clean up timer. Students become self sufficient with clean up time and are ready to rotate independently!