Primary Literacy Centers: Making Reading and Writing Stick!

by Susan Nations, Susan Nations

For K-3 teachers Seven easy-to-maintain centers help you work smarter, not harder, as you connect standards-based reading and writing instruction with student application of skills and strategies. Your literacy centers will become focused places of learning, keeping you free to teach small groups and minimize student interruption--and you control how to fit the centers into your day. Primary Literacy Supports the balanced literacy approach; Features 36 language arts mini-lessons with easy-to-use center connections; Correlates to NCTE/IRA National Language Arts Standards; Incorporates both fiction and nonfiction text; and Gives students time to practice and apply literacy-block skills and strategies that you teach and model &&/UL&&Here's everything you need to know to set up and manage centers in a balanced literacy framework Reading, Word Work, Read the Room, Listening, Research, Literature Response, Writing, and Poetry. Make literacy centers a vital part of your classroom!

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Brianna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a valuable teaching resource for teachers who use literacy centres or the Daily 5 in their classrooms, to go along with other books that discuss the same topic. The lessons that connect to the various centres are often open-ended enough that they could be used again in various ways by the students to engage in effective literacy practice. Many of the "reading" lessons also fit very nicely with "The Sisters" CAFE strategies for reading, which is good for group instruction time. I enjoyed the parts about accountability during centre time, and the open-ended literature response matrix. I will be using parts of these in my classroom this year.

This book's one weakness is that it doesn't give you ideas of how to actually set up the centres - although the centres it suggests seem to be good ones. If you want a better book for that choose Debbie Diller's "Literacy Work Stations" or "The Daily Five." Overall however, this is a resource I will be consulting to add in new ideas and activities to my "centres."