Decide the type of literacy skills you wish to reinforce through literacy centers. Choose skills that are appropriate for the grade and ability level of your students. For example, you may want to reinforce letter-sound recognition, writing skills or sight word recognition.
Design center activities that meet your students' interests while promoting development of the skills on which you wish to focus. Activities may include hands-on games or arts and crafts activities. For instance, use a matching game to reinforce letter-sound recognition or encourage children to trace letters with finger paint to encourage handwriting development.
Store materials and items needed for learning centers in clearly marked plastic tubs, folders, boxes and other storage items. Include a set of pictorial directions that illustrates how to properly use the items in the literacy center.
Review the directions and proper procedures to follow while using the literacy learning centers. Introduce new center activities as a whole-group activity and model how to use the materials, review the goals of the activities and clarify any questions that may arise.
Create a list of rules that students must follow while working in the learning centers. Review the rules with students and discuss consequences for inappropriate behavior or use of the learning center items.
Limit the number of children allowed to use each learning center at any given time to avoid chaos, confusion and inappropriate behavior.
Include assessment activities that allow you to determine the knowledge children attain through learning center activities. Have children complete worksheets that pertain to the centers and assess their progress by analyzing their performance on the worksheets. Work with students one-on-one and ask them to answer questions that pertain to the center activities; for example, ask them to identify words that begin with specific letters of the alphabet.