Several years ago, we attended a presentation by Niki Campo Stallone about literacy centers. We have tweaked and tuned those ideas and made them work for us. We are also trying to mesh them with the Daily 5 ideas. One way to accomplish this for us is the Red Reading Folder. We leave students' leveled readers in the front pocket (for read to self and guided reading).
There is a poetry section in the front where we focus on buttering popcorn words, finding capital letters, and ending punctuation marks. Students are to illustrate the poem as well. We always ask students to tell us about their picture and how it relates to the poem. This is a great way of getting students to retell the "story". We also have a poetry flipchart for the IWB that goes along with the poem of the week. In the beginning we mainly focus on Nursery Rhymes- I am always shocked at the number of students that do not know Nursery Rhymes.
In the back there is a section for all targeted reading comprehension skills that are aligned with our reading curriculum. For this section we love the sheets made by Deanna Jump. This folder serves many purposes for our reading block. (One of which is hitting many of those Common Core Standards.)
