1. On the website for the
Florida Center for Reading Research, teachers can find learning center activities specifically designed for K-1 students. These activities are divided in phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
2. Follow this link to the revised
K-1 Center activities. Book 1 focuses on phoneme awareness and phonics. Check out the phonics activities which are in seven sections:
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Section 1 – letter recognition
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Section 2 – letter sound correspondence
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Section 3 – onset-rime
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Section 4 – encoding and decoding
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Section 5 – high frequency words
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Section 6 – variant correspondences
- Section 7 – syllable patterns and morpheme structures
3. Here is an archived site of the
Home-School Links that are designed for take-home activities, but many of these first grade activities relate to phonics and can be used during classroom instruction or in learning centers.
4.
Watch a teacher managing a center activity.
5.
Reading Activities website includes suggestion for setting up literacy centers and activities. When using any website developed by practitioners, teachers are cautioned to be discerning decision makers when selecting activities. Activities chosen should be doable, yet challenging with sufficient rigor and with relevance to skills/concepts being taught. Activities should also support evidence-based practice. For example, this site includes information on sustained silent reading and Accelerated Reader. Neither of these activities/programs provide explicit, direct instruction of beginning reading skills.
6. View the video clip titled
Roundtable Discussion: Literacy Workstations for a discussion among a 3rd grade and a 5th grade teacher and the author, Debbie Diller, about literacy work stations. Center activities are for practice only. This requires that students know how to complete activities in the Center and have engaged in those activities previously during guided practice. Center activities should be doable, but challenging and must accommodate the range of abilities of children who will be using the Center.
7.
Using Student Center Activities To Differentiate Reading Instruction describes a suite of Student Center Activities offering teachers a wide range of activities to engage students in differentiated reading activities during small-group work in the classroom. The activities target specific skills, scaffold student learning, and provide engaging practice to extend student learning and increase the time focused on critical reading skills at all levels of reading proficiency. Originally prepared for use in Florida schools, these activities are appropriate in any elementary school context and are consistent with scientific research on reading instruction.