Literacy Centers

One of the things I've been seeing a lot in the blogging world is literacy centers. This is something I have never been good at it. But I really wanted to try this year and with all the support in the blogging world I think I can do it. We've just been having play centers the past 2 weeks. I have been a little discouraged about starting some literacy and math centers because my kids seem so young and like they can't be independent. But after getting some inspiration from a variety of blogs, I think I'm going to try to introduce some learning centers this week. I need to work with some of the kids in a small group. My ELL students need some extra help with sorting in math and some of the students need some practice with holding their pencils and writing their names. I would also like to do some assessing at some point. So trying literacy centers will hopefully help that.
We need to do some work with our names and I love the idea of a stamping center where I  can just change out the words to stamp. So the first center I'm going to introduce to them is a word work stamping center. I've made a sheet to practice writing their names and then stamping them. (click here to get it) I was inspired by the stamping sheets on work smart not hard teaching kindergarten. Click her button to get some more stamping sheets. I plan to introduce it whole group and show them what to do and then pull them with groups to let them practice it while the rest of the class is having their center time. We'll talk about how to take care of the stamps and what to do with their work when they are finished. I'll introduce this one Tuesday and Wednesday.

The next center I'm going to introduce is a math game center. We're working on sorting and classifying and the vocabulary same and different. The math series provides some centers for the kids to use. I'm not crazy about all of them but the first one is a memory matching game. The kids have to find the matches that are the same. Again I'll introduce this game whole group and then we'll take the time to play the game with partners. 

 The third center I would like to introduce this week is some kind of alphabet center. I've already introduced them to the idea of using play doh to make letters. Last week we made the word can out of playdoh as a class. I got the letters from Kindergals (Click here to see their post). I've glued them to card stock and laminated them. We'll do a whole group lesson again to review and hopefully they'll be ready. The plan is to be doing these learning centers and some of the play ones on Thursday and Friday after spending Tuesday and Wednesday introducing them.

Wish me luck! If you have any hints or tips for starting literacy centers, be sure to let me know. I've been doing some research on the blogs. I'll update with pictures hopefully later this week to let you know how it's going.
Writing this post helped me to sort it out in my head what I wanted to do and gives me a little accountability to actually do it.. Another perk of teacher blogging.