This lesson gives teachers resources and guidance to create reading, listening, computer, and poetry Literacy Centers in their own classrooms.
Literacy Centers: Getting Started
Involving Students and Families in Ongoing Reflection and Assessment
Students begin by writing a sentence or two each week and progress to daily reflections and records of their school activity. Families respond to these student reflections, which become the basis for discussion among family, teacher, and students.
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.
Living the Dream: 100 Acts of Kindness
This lesson provides the "action piece" for any study of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this project, students participate in Dr. King's dream by doing 100 acts of kindness.
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.
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.
Literature Circles with Primary Students Using Self-Selected Reading
Students respond to self-selected books in journals, and talk about their books daily in small groups. The teacher guides students by offering suggestions and writing with them in dialogue journals.
Have Journal...Will Travel: Promoting Family Involvement in Literacy
Students build positive memories of literacy activities when they take turns taking home a book bag stuffed with items to encourage literacy interactions with their families.
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.
Catching the Bug for Reading Through Interactive Read-Alouds
Students learn about story structure, new vocabulary, and a variety of reading strategies by participating in an interactive read-aloud of Miss Bindergarten Stays Home From Kindergarten by Joseph Slate.
Shared Experiences, Individual Impressions: Buddies Create PowerPoint Stories
Stories and snapshots of school-related experiences are the perfect sources of inspiration for students as they create PowerPoint presentations with the help of an older student.
Learning Centers: From Shared to Independent Practice
Seven blind mice—see how they spend each day of the week in this lesson that uses the book Seven Blind Mice to guide students through shared reading, writing, and listening activities.
Building Phonemic Awareness With Phoneme Isolation
Students improve phonemic awareness through games and chants that help them isolate beginning and ending sounds and connect them with their written symbols (graphemes).
Choosing the Right Book: Strategies for Beginning Readers
Students make purposeful choices for their reading materials, thinking about their reasons for reading a book and using strategies to match books to their abilities.
Student of the Day: Create Sound/Letter Understanding With Names
Name games make learning letters fun and interactive in this lesson where students get to know more about each other as they spell out their classmates' names.
A Journal for Corduroy: Responding to Literature
Connect home and school, literature and life, as students take a storybook character home with them and take turns writing stories about his visit.