This lesson gives teachers resources and guidance to create reading, listening, computer, and poetry Literacy Centers in their own classrooms.
Literacy Centers: Getting Started
Improving Fluency through Group Literary Performance
Students participate in shared reading, choral reading, and readers theater, using books by Bill Martin, Jr. Repeated readings and literary performances help students with their reading accuracy, expression, and rate.
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.
Building a Matrix for Leo Lionni Books: An Author Study
In this author study, students listen to and discuss four books by Leo Lionni. They identify similarities and differences in the stories and then compare two stories of their choice.
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.
Guess What's in the Bag: A Language-based Activity
Students play a guessing game to practice using descriptive language.
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.
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.
Rosa Parks was born on this day in 1913.
Rosa Parks was committed to the struggle for social justice and human rights until her death, inspiring millions of people around the world. Today, we celebrate her!
Read Across America Day: Celebrate a Nation of Diverse Readers
Bring the celebration of reading and literacy into your classroom, library, school, and home all year long.
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.
Word Family Sort
This online activity helps students recognize word patterns by having them sort a series of words into short-vowel word families.
Peer Review
This strategy guide explains how you can employ peer review in your classroom, guiding students as they offer each other constructive feedback to improve their writing and communication skills.
Using Partner Talk to Strengthen Student Collaboration and Understanding
In this strategy guide, you'll learn about Partner Talk—a way to provide students with another learning opportunity to make learning their own through collaboration and discussion.
Using Paired Reading to Increase Fluency and Peer Cooperation
In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. This strategy can also be used to pair older students with younger students to create "reading buddies."
Using Songwriting to Build Awareness of Beginning Letter Sounds
"Bessie bird lives in a barn" in this lesson in which students create alliterative animal songs to help them learn letter names and consonant sounds and build phonemic awareness.
The Big Green Monster Teaches Phonics in Reading and Writing
A big green monster helps students build their reading fluency and word recognition skills through choral reading, literacy center activities, and writing stories.