Well-Designed Literacy Centers

It is important that when teaching emergent literacy that we as teachers not only motivate our students to read, but that we provide meaningful opportunities to implement that skill. One way to do this is to incorporate literacy centers into our reading blocks during the typical school day. According to Literacy Development in the Early Years: Helping Children Read and Write written by Lesley Mandel Morrow, "A classroom literacy center is comprised of a library corner and a writing area. In literacy centers children have choices, they collaborate, and they face challenging tasks and help each other to succeed with them," (323). 

Morrow mentions several necessary furnishings to literacy centers. These include, but are not limited to: a rug, headsets and audio stories, puppets, literacy posters, an "Author's Spot" for writing, a library corner, felt or magnetic boards, elements of softness (like stuffed animals), and many more. 

With emerging readers, I enjoy each of the above mentioned aspects of literacy centers because they allow students to have independent and creative interactions with the stories that they are reading. For example, felt of magnetic story boards allow students to represent the characters that they are reading about in their own creative ways. One aspect of the literacy center that I would add in my own classroom would be an illustration area that allows students access to drawing materials and different types of paper. This would allow students to represent what they are attempting to read physically if they are not yet of an ability level where they can read and write down their own ideas. This also allows for creative adaptations and interpretations of each story that a child reads. 

The library corner of the classroom is one of the areas that I feel is most important to well-designed literacy centers. According to Morrow, "The library corner is the part of the literacy center used for storing books," (326). Although fairly straightforward, Morrow also discusses different ways to display the books for the students, as well as different types of books that should be in the library corner. A few organizational arrangements include shelving the books with their spines facing out, but another organizational arrangement includes organizing the book by category or theme, and placing the books in categorized bins so that students can decide what to read based on a topic that may be of interest to them. For emerging readers, I think the latter method would be quite effective because students are likely to have a greater vocabulary of topics in which they are interested, which can lead to better comprehension of these particular stories, and can grow their individual vocabulary, as well as content-specific vocabulary. In sorting books in this fashion, they do not always have to be sorted by category, their type or genre can be another form of classification. For example, I would separate picture books from informational books or traditional literature, because students at a lower reading level would likely prefer picture books. 

In my classroom's literacy center design I would include a rug, pillows, and bean bag chairs for students to free read, a technology center for students to interact with e-texts and participate in software and online reading enrichment activities. I would also include white boards and felt boards for the students to interact with, along with an illustrator section. Each student in my classroom would also have a notebook where I would ask them to practice being an author during our literacy center time. I would include a center option where students can listen to audio recordings of stories as they read along. I would organize my library corner with my books set by themes that we will discuss during the year, and all other books will be organized alphabetically by title. If students choose to read these, they will place their name book mark in the place where the book was located so that when they return it, they can see where it goes. In this way, I can also monitor what the students are reading. I would also have the students ensure that each day of the week they participate in a different center so that they are not constantly participating in the same literary experiences each day.

Overall, teachers are responsible for designing their literacy centers based on the needs of their students and experiences that they believe would be most beneficial to them. Above are aspects and ideas for a well-designed literacy center approach, but each classroom will differ. 

A few questions to think about:

Which aspects named in the text would you incorporate into your own literacy centers?

What will you be doing as the students are participating in literacy centers?

Are there any aspects of a well-designed literacy center approach that you do not agree with?