Literacy Centers (Emilea Bade)

One of the great resources for literacy centers that I found was a website called "Literacy Centers: Literacy Center Ideas and Management Tips." (http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/literacy_stations/main.html) This website has every resource that I could imagine a teacher would possibly need to set up their own literacy centers in their classroom. The website has a section that goes through the setup and management of your literacy centers. This section of the site gives ideas on how to use things such as rotation charts to keep your centers organized and running smoothly. You can also view pictures of the different charts and signs that can be created for the management of the centers. Another thing that this website offers is ideas of what to do for your different centers. The website puts these into categories such as writing centers, listening centers, vocabulary centers, and computer centers, so that they are easy to browse through and select a station that works well for your particular classroom. You can also purchase different packets from the website that include different activities such as games that can be useful for your literacy centers.
Another resource that I found was elementary-teacher-resources.com (http://www.elementary-teacher-resources.com/literacy-centers.html). This website has more information and examples of literacy centers that teachers may want to implement in their own classrooms. The website includes a YouTube video that you can view of the different elements of a perfect center as well as information about different kinds of centers. Each center mentioned in the short video has pictures that supplement it giving the viewer a great visual of how the center looks when it is being used in the classroom. You can also view individual pages for each literacy center that the video mentions so that you can get a more in depth description of the materials needed and how to set up each literacy center. On this website you can also sent in your own ideas for literacy centers that have worked for you.
The last interesting site that I found is "Literacy Centers in Kindergarten" (http://www.learningtoread.ecsd.net/KLiteracyCenters.htm). It is easy to think of activities for upper elementary students who are better readers to do in literacy centers, but kindergartners can seem more challenging to some since they are only starting to develop basic reading and writing skills. This website includes ideas of literacy centers to use with kindergartners and includes pictures of the centers being used in a classroom. These centers focus a lot more on phonemic awareness and alphabet and letter activities. There are also some centers that help the students to being reading books and writing. This website could also be beneficial to elementary teachers with first to third grade classes because the activities could be geared up and altered a bit to become great centers for other lower elementary grade levels.