This lesson gives teachers resources and guidance to create reading, listening, computer, and poetry Literacy Centers in their own classrooms.
Literacy Centers: Getting Started
A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry
Children find favorite words, phrases, and sentences from familiar stories. Working together, they combine their words and phrases to create a poem. The poem is then shared as performance poetry.
Authentic Writing Experiences and Math Problem-Solving Using Shopping Lists
Students use their emerging writing skills to write shopping lists. They work within a budget, use problem-solving skills to create lists, and buy their favorite treats at the class store.
Note Writing in the Primary Classroom
This lesson provides a wealth of ideas for using notes in the classroom to promote authentic writing among children.
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.
Literature Response in Primary Classrooms
This step-by-step literature response template for use with read-alouds asks students to use drawing and writing to respond to increasingly-complex prompts which address literary elements as well as personal connections.
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.
Using Children's Natural Curiosity to Lead to Descriptive Writing
Inspired by the book It Begins with an A, kindergarten students are invited to turn their curiosity and guesswork into a class book, complete with illustrated objects and descriptive language
Stapleless Book
The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!
Diamante Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write diamante poems.
Acrostic Poems
This online tool enables students to learn about and write acrostic poems. Elements of the writing process are also included.
Theme Poems
Formerly known as Shape Poems, this online tool allows elementary students to write poems in various shapes.
Using the Think-Pair-Share Technique
In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and classroom topics to encourage a high degree of classroom participation and assist students in developing a conceptual understanding of a topic through the use of the Think-Pair-Share technique.
Developing Academic Vocabulary
In this Strategy Guide Series, you'll find creative and compatible ways to build, maintain, and extend students' vocabulary across academic disciplines.
Using Word Walls to Develop and Maintain Academic Vocabulary
In this guide, you will learn how to use Word Walls to support vocabulary development and retention.