As an elementary school teacher we all know when you get to Friday, you and the kids are ready for the weekend. As an elementary kid, I remembered looking forward to Friday Fun activities every week. So when I became a teacher I wanted my students to have that same excitement to look forward to. I didn’t know how to do that with all of the standards that had to be in place all the time. (Kids need to be kids sometimes, right?) Anyway, that’s a soapbox for another day. With these two things in mind, I came up with Friday Fun Centers! I will lay out how these worked best in my classroom but make the tweaks you need to make them right for your classroom.

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Friday Fun Center Activities

I would keep the same routine and number of groups as our math and reading centers, but make each center a little more fun! This way the kids had something to look forward to, but if anyone came by the classroom they’d still see the standards and lesson plan being met. Here is a list of some of the Friday Fun Center Activities that we did:

• Journal time with the fun gel pens! (and they could illustrate once they were done)
• Read with a furry friend – I had stuffed animals they could choose from to read with.
• Use math manipulatives to build – I would give them a specific thing to build like a bridge or a tower etc. to tie in STEM.
• Tablet free time! – They were able to pick any of the educational apps that were on the Kindles we had in the classroom.
• Color by Sight Word Pages – They would get sight word practice and be able to color a mystery picture at the same time.
• SmartBoard Games – SmartBoard actually has a lot of educational games for free in their store that you can download!
• Whiteboard Spelling – I let them use my whiteboard and expo markers to practice spelling words with each other.

You get the idea! Just adding something they don’t normally get to do makes it so exciting for your students. I am sure you are coming up with your own ideas as you are reading this!

The Rules We Had In Place

Now, these will be different for every classroom but I will let you know what worked best for us. I made Friday Fun Centers a part of my Class Dojo Reward System (you can read more about that here!). So if the whole class earned our point goal we were able to have Friday Fun Centers! Then, if any kiddos lost points during the week (it usually took quite a bit for me to take points) they would have to sit out. For each point they lost they would lose a center. While they were sitting out they would have to be writing about what they needed to improve on for the next week so they wouldn’t miss out on the Friday Fun Activities.

As for the rest of the routines, I had set up my expectations with all center times at the beginning of the year. This applied to Friday Fun Centers as well. Things like voice levels, cleaning up, rotating, were all set in place and they used them the same. I also used my Center Rotation PowerPoint so that everything ran smoothly without me needing to interfere at all. I could enjoy time with the students to build our classroom environment or if something needed to be done around the classroom I could do that as well.

Friday Fun Centers were something we always looked forward to each week as a class. I hope these ideas can help spark some Friday Fun Activities both you and your students will love. Let me know how it works with your classroom in the comments below!

* Any yellow underlined links are an affiliate link. As an Amazon Associate, I earn a commission from qualifying purchases.**