Are you planning to run literacy groups or literacy centres in your classroom to provide multiple opportunities for targeted practice of new and old skills? We know literacy groups are a classroom routine that is often seen in early years classrooms. After all, the literacy abilities of the children in a classroom will often vary significantly, and this routine promotes independence and collaboration while also opening the door to more tailored hands-on activities to suit the needs of all learners in a classroom.
With all that in mind, the teachers on the Teach Starter team sat down to create the ultimate guide for teachers for setting up literacy groups or centres — what you need to know to group your students, how to set them up, and of course some activities to add! Let’s dive in.
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Why Are Literacy Groups Important?
If you’re new to literacy groups in the classroom, it may be worth taking a step back and looking at the ‘why’ behind this teaching tool. There’s been a significant amount of educational research into literacy rotations over the years and their effect on student reading comprehension, and the experts largely agree that students benefit from the ability for teachers to differentiate instruction, the ability to engage in small group work with peers, and the ability for teachers to assess student progress and understanding.
But research has also shown that small-group instruction in reading can end up widening achievement gaps if they’re not set up correctly or used well by teachers. It’s important to be flexible and constantly monitor student progress to use your groups effectively. Read on for advice on getting it right from our teacher team!
How to Group for Literacy Rotations
Typically, the grouping of students for literacy rotations is based on their reading level, and that has been determined by a diagnostic tool. However, research is now telling us that grouping our students for the purposes of building up the skills required to become confident readers may be the better approach, and it’s one you’ll want to consider when you’re setting up your groups.
For example, in an early years classroom, you may be doing a lot of blending and segmenting practise. Therefore, you may group your students based on some of the following skills:
- Phonological and phonemic awareness
- Phonics knowledge
- Blending and segmenting skills
Setting Up Literacy Groups
Exactly how you set up your literacy group is going to depend on a number of factors. How many students do you have? What year level are you teaching? What are your individual students’ needs?
But to give you an example, let’s look at one Teach Starter teacher team member’s Year 2 class. She broke students out into 6 groups and planned for 6 activities a week (3 days of 2 rotations). Each rotation lasted approximately 20 minutes with 10 minutes for transition and feedback.
While each station will focus on a different skill, they should all follow essential, evidence-based quality instruction. Here are some examples of stations you may set up for your literacy groups:
- Decoding
- Fluency
- Comprehension
- Writing (encoding)
- Vocabulary
Teach Starter Teacher Tip: When planning the activities. it is important to work out how much extra help you can get during this time. Plan groups around any teacher aide time and sk for parent volunteers. The more help you can get during this time, the better it is for you and your students.
Activity Ideas for Literacy Groups
Decoding Activities
This rotation can include many different activities depending on the skill level of your students. When decoding, young learners need to have phonological awareness, a basic understanding of phonics, and also the ability to blend and segment sounds.
Some activities you could use at this station include:
- If students have knowledge of single phonemes, these Read, Find and Colour – CVC Words are a great set of worksheets that students can complete independently and practise decoding CVC words.
- Which Word? CVC Decoding worksheet set is also another great independent task for students to complete to practise decoding CVC words.
- How Does it End? Final Sounds Match-Up Activityis a literacy group activity that has students consolidating their understanding of end sounds.
- Using playdough and a set of Decodable Sound Button Flashcards, students need to create balls of playdough for each of the sounds, segment, and then blend!
- Onset and Rime Match-Up Activity is a great hands-on activity where students practise building words by matching the onset and the rime.
- If you have a Teacher Aide at this station you could use some Decodable Text Worksheets if students are ready.
- Play SPLAT! is a fun activity for students to play where they practise decoding words that involve blending of consonants at the end.
- Practise segmenting and blending using Segmenting and Blending Mats.
Teach Starter Teacher Tip: If they are using a hands-on activity, why not get your students to take a photo of the completed task on an iPad so you can check for understanding?
Phonics Activities
One popular teaching idea is to set up a phonics station where the students purely focus on the weekly phoneme that was getting taught in class that week. There are so many fun phonics games and engaging activities that you could do here!
Want a hands-on, active station? Here are some ideas:
- Go outside with your parent helper and use chalk to write the weekly graphemes.
- Play hopscotch with known graphemes in each square. Students need to pronounce them as they hop in the square.
- Use playdough to create words using the graphemes.
- Use magnetic letter tiles to create words that feature the focus grapheme.
- Search through a simple text for words that contain the grapheme and write it in their books.
- Phoneme Spotter Stories are great to have students try to find focus phonemes.
- Get active with some Move It Active PowerPoints. In these PowerPoints, students practise reading and identifying long and short vowel words such aslong and short vowel ‘u’ words, long and short vowel ‘i’ words and long and short vowel ‘e’ words.
Writing/Grammar Activities
The writing station will vary from week to week. This depends on the text type the students are learning or the areas where you feel students may need extra support and practise. Maybe you’ll want to do a free writing using a writing stimulus, other times you may want to link to the text type focus students are learning about.
Here are some writing activities that may be useful to use at this station:
- Download theGlorious Grammar booklet with 50 activities suitable for older year levels ready to go.
- For beginning writing, download these Sentence Starter Stripsfor them to practise writing a full sentence. Each strip has an image and a starting word to get them going.
- Build and Write a Sentenceis a set of worksheets that is perfect to help students get started with their writing. Each worksheet contains 16 simple words. Students choose words from the table to build a sentence of their own.
- Perfect for the early years classroom, this Making Sentences resource has students tracing over a sentence, cutting out the words, gluing the words in order, writing the sentence independently, and then colouring a picture to match.
- Here’s one for the older students. Consolidate their knowledge of Direct and Indirect Speech with this Direct and Indirect Speech board game.
- Help students master the use of the comma with these fun Comma Task Cards they can complete.
- Consolidate students’ knowledge of the text type they are learning about with different activities like this Persuasive Devices Sorting Activity.
Vocabulary Activities
A student’s vocabulary plays a fundamental role in the reading and writing process. Here are some vocabulary activity examples you could use at this station:
- Older students can practise their understanding of prefixes with this Prefixes Worksheet.
- Students practise their knowledge of compound words with this Compound Word Match-Up Activity.
- Students can learn about synonyms with this Synonym Word Match Cards.
- Use this time to look at your Word of the Week. Students can complete their Word of the Week Mat.
Comprehension Activities
Comprehension strategies are an important focus in any classroom literacy program. In an early years classroom, you may like to focus on one strategy a week using a variety of activities.Sometimes you may want to read a small passage with a parent/teacher aide and then answer questions relating to the comprehension strategy for that week.
Other times you can incorporate an activity/game/match-up task that reinforces the weekly comprehension strategy. At Teach Starter, we have a large collectionof comprehension activities and textsthat would be useful at this station.Our comprehension strategy packs are convenient and include a range of activities.
Activity examples:
- You may have noticed we have a collection of Student Magazines available on the website. There is a range of year levels and each text has accompanying comprehension questions to use.
- Have students practise their understanding of a fact and an opinion with this Is it Fact or an Opinion Worksheet.
- This Using Context Clues Worksheet is a great one for students to practise using context clues to identify the meaning of new words when reading.
- Here’s one for the early years —Aiming for Inference Posters. This activity has 6 mini posters showing different scenarios that can be used when encouraging students to use inference.
- Making Predictions Task cards is appropriate for Years 3 – Year 4 and will have students practise making predictions.
- On each of the Decodable Texts we have available, there are three mini-comprehension questions at the bottom of those worksheets that could be used for the younger year levels.
- These Decodable Text to Picture Match-Up Cards are a great way for students to practise decoding and then check to see if they have understood the sentence by matching a picture to the text.
- These Cause and Effect Matching Cards would be great to use to consolidate students’ knowledge of the words ’cause’ and ‘effect.’
Explore a complete collection of printable decodable readers to use in your early years classrooms!
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