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.
Acrostic Poems: All About Me and My Favorite Things
Students create acrostic poems using their names and the names of things that are important to them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Draw a Story: Stepping from Pictures to Writing
Students draw a series of pictures that tell a story, including character action, problem and solution. They ‘read' their story to others, transcribe it into writing, and create an accordion book.
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!
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.
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.
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.