Literacy Centers in Senior Infants!

My kids love our new literacy centers - we spend about 15 minutes on them every second morning (alternating with structured play for oral language development!) Each table tries out a different activity everyday:

1.) Readers and Teachers: 

Working in pairs, one child, the ‘teacher’ pointed to words in the room (environmental print, words on posters, labels etc) and their partner the ‘reader’ (wearing cardboard glasses) read the words for them.

2.) Post Office:

 We write letters, cards, shopping lists and notes to our friends and to teacher on different kinds of paper and post them in the post box in the classroom. I have included some word charts to aid their writing (feelings, sports and activities, food, days of the week, months of the year etc).

3.) Label the Room:

  

We label things in the room using post-it notes. They either use invented spelling, words they know already or copy signs from the environment when writing these labels.

4.) Card Games:

 Where one person plays cvc spelling games, another matches sounds to pictures, another matches upper and lower case letters together and another matches words to the appropriate picture. 

5.) Magnetic Letters:  

We pick words from the box to spell on the whiteboard using magnetic letters. 

I have never used literacy centers before but I have to say I absolutely love it ... despite having to clean up all the post-its at the end of the day! I may change some of these centers when everyone has had a couple of goes at each center, but that won't be for a while yet! I'm also going to give maths centers a try sometime soon, but will get back to you on that one! Happy teaching!

Letter Formation Stations

As I haven't finished the current unit of work I am working on at the moment (People who help us) I will write this week about something I do every week regardless of the theme... letter formation stations!
Before I tell you about the different stations I have going during writing time, here is a really good interactive letter tracing resource I use to launch lessons along with letter formation rhymes and stories:

Interactive Letter Formation Resource

For about 5-10 minutes of the letter formation lesson I usually get them to practice writing the letters on their whiteboards and attempt to get rid of bad formation habits before I let them off on their own making letters.

Station 1: Making letters out of playdough. (Here's the recipe I used to make mine: Playdoh Recipe)

Station 2: Continue practicing letter formation on whiteboards.

Station 3: Repeated practice of letters in sand boxes (old perfume gift boxes filled with a thin layer of sand). Shake the box when they run out of space and start again.

Station 4: I give them A5 sheets of paper with the letter printed on them about 6 times.They must cover the letters with glue, cut some pieces of wool up and stick them on to cover the shapes of the letters.

Station 5: Formation of letters on blackboards with chalk or on lined paper taking note of tall, small and fall letters as they write them. Usually consists of a front page of letters (capital and lower case versions of the letter being studied) and a back page of words starting with the letter (e.g Ryan the rabbit).

Possible Station 6 idea: I also like the idea featured on this website: All About Learning Press where a Ziploc bag is filled with soap and taped to the table and then the letters are traced on the bag. I tried making this but have not tried it out in the classroom as of yet!

Children are moved around stations after roughly 5 minutes at a station. They continue the work of the child who has left the seat empty in the case of the writing on lined paper exercise and the sticking wool onto the letters exercise.