This lesson gives teachers resources and guidance to create reading, listening, computer, and poetry Literacy Centers in their own classrooms.
Literacy Centers: Getting Started
What's the Difference? Beginning Writers Compare E-mail with Letter Writing
Students compare e-mails to traditional letters, identifying style and intended audience for each. They then write both an e-mail and a letter about the same topic.
Writing Poetry with Rebus and Rhyme
This lesson encourages students to use rhyming words to write rebus poetry modeled on rebus books, which substitute pictures for the words that young students cannot yet identify or decode.
Playing Name Bingo with Chrysanthemum
In this twist on traditional bingo, the game boards feature students' names, and students answer questions designed to help them learn more about one another when their names are called.
Dr. Seuss's Sound Words: Playing with Phonics and Spelling
Boom! Br-r-ring! Cluck! Moo!Everywhere you turn, you find exciting sounds. Students use these sounds to write their own poems based on Dr. Seuss's Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?
Persuasive Writing: What Can Writing in Family Message Journals Do for Students?
This lesson engages children in using writing to their families as a persuasive tool to get what they want and need.
Growing Readers and Writers with Help from Mother Goose
Watch Mother Goose work her magic! This lesson uses nursery rhymes to help emergent readers remember the letters and their sounds and identify word chunks.
Family Message Journals Teach Many Purposes for Writing
This lesson encourages children to explore authentic reasons for writing by writing messages to their family in a family message journal.
Launching Family Message Journals
This lesson introduces Family Message Journalsa teacher-tested tool for encouraging family involvement and supporting writing to reflect and to learn.
Using Repetition and Picture Cues to Foster Independent Young Readers
Kindergartners share their knowledge of letters and sounds in a large group setting, giving teachers an assessment opportunity. Each student contributes a page to make a repetitive classroom book.
What's in a Name? Teaching Concepts of Letter and Word
In this recurring activity, the process of choosing a helper for the day becomes a literacy activity, with the helper's name as a starting place for reading and writing.
Puzzle Me Words
Puzzle Me Words is a fun, educational game for primary students that reinforces letter sounds and how sounds combine to form words.
Crossword Puzzles
This tool allows students to complete crossword puzzles on a variety of grade-appropriate topics, and also create and print their own crossword puzzles.
ABC Match
ABC Match is a game that has students practice letter-recognition fluency while honing their memories. Students match initial letters with pictures, playing either with a timer or without.
Word Family Sort
This online activity helps students recognize word patterns by having them sort a series of words into short-vowel word families.
Alphabet Organizer
Students use this online tool to create an alphabet chart or pages for an alphabet book.
Picture Match
Picture Match is a matching game that reinforces the concept of beginning-letter and short- and long-vowel sounds.
Construct-a-Word
Using Construct-a-Word, students learn letter-sound correspondence by combining a beginning letter or blend to a word ending to create words.
Alphabet Chart
This alphabet chart has many possibilities for helping your students learn and review their letters, sounds, phonemes, and word formations.
Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom
Katie Wood Ray explains in practical terms the theoretical underpinnings of how elementary and middle school students learn to write from their reading.