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.
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.
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.
Book Buddy Biographies: Intermediate and Primary Students Working Together
Students create a personalized biography for their reading buddy, and each child is the author, illustrator, and editor.
Guess What's in the Bag: A Language-based Activity
Students play a guessing game to practice using descriptive language.
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.
2025 NCTE Annual Convention
Each November thousands of literacy educators from across the country make the journey to a Convention that inspires their practice and rejuvenates their profession.
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.
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.
Persuasive Writing
This strategy guide focuses on persuasive writing and offers specific methods on how you can help your students use it to improve their critical writing and thinking skills.
Performing Literature to Promote Fluency and Comprehension
This study guide outlines three reading methods--Readers Theatre, choral reading, and performing poetry-- that can be used to promote fluency and comprehension.
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.
Let's Build a Snowman
In this lesson, students use both fiction and nonfiction texts, the Internet, and a K-W-L chart to learn about how animals survive the winter.