Literacy Centres

This week we began our daily Literacy Centers. Each day students worked their way through a variety of centers that include, story writing, reading, spelling and Social Studies.
Literacy Centers have a number of positive benefits for student learning. They promote independence and ownership of student learning as they monitor the time of each centre and remain accountable for completing their work in that amount of time. Each of the centers are planned to be engaging while giving students a chance to practice and extend their learning of activities that have been taught during instructional time.
Research has shown that the implementation of literacy centers allow teachers to cater to all different learning styles by providing opportunities of multi sensory learning that combines auditory, visual and tactile elements into a learning task.

This week our centers gave students multiple chances to strengthen their reading and writing skills by working on the following tasks:
Centre #1 - Reading: Students were given a novel that they will read with their group and will also be the base for a number of activities throughout the next few weeks.
Centre #2 - Work with Teacher: During this time students worked with me on developing their story plot line for their Pixar narrative stories. Each week there will be a different focus as they work with me.
Centre #3 - Spelling: Students worked on strengthen their spelling and vocabulary by playing different literacy based games on the iPad.
Centre #4 -  Inferencing: We have been working so hard on strengthening this skill over the last few weeks that students spent time transferring their knowledge of this skill into their writing. Students were given a picture that they had to write a short story about what they thought was happening in the picture.
Centre #5 - Close Reading/Notes: Students were given a link based on their grade that was connected to what we are learning in Social Studies. Grade 4's worked through an interactive website that taught them about the different regions of Alberta. Students read the information and took notes on the different aspect of the region. Grade 5's were given a link to a fun and informational video about Canada. As they watched the video they took notes about interesting facts and information about each Province.

These centers will continue to evolve and change throughout the year as students learn new skills and curriculum. We look forward to showing you what we have been doing at Conferences.
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