Word work centers to add to your daily literacy instruction.

I love teaching and practicing phonics with hands on word work centers! Word work centers make it fun for students to practice phonics patterns, reading, spelling, decoding, and more! During my years of teaching I have noticed that students can struggle with phonics patterns and I have found that incorporating these word work centers into my daily literacy instruction and literacy centers, students have become phonics masters!

My students become phonics masters with the help of Word Work Mats. Word Work Mats are fun, engaging, and a hands on way to practice phonics patterns and reading words! These word work centers can be used with small group literacy instruction or as part of your literacy centers. Today I am going to share with you what Word Work Mats are, how I implement these word work activities into my classroom, and FREE sample to get you started!

Word Work Centers

My students love working on their words through these hands on Word Work Mats. These word work centers are student friendly, fun, hands on, and great practice! Each word work mat includes a list of 6 words based on a specific skill, a place for students to build the words with letter cards, a place for students to write the words, and a place to find and circle the picture of each word. They are super easy to prep! I simply print the mat and letter cards for the skill I want to use. I like to print the mats on white cardstock and the letter cards on colored paper. I also write a little number on the back of the letter cards in case one falls on the floor, I can easily place it back in the correct container. I laminate everything for durability and to use with dry erase markers, cut the letter cards apart, and store them in a container.

Add Word Work Mats to your literacy centers and literacy instruction.

Implementing Word Work Centers

I use these word work centers as part of my small group literacy instruction and as part of my students’ literacy centers.

Small Group Instruction

On Mondays I introduce a phonics skill to my class through a whole group mini lesson. For example, if we are learning about r-controlled vowels, we will create an anchor chart together, find r-controlled vowels in our weekly read aloud, and read r-controlled vowel picture cards and place them on our anchor chart or in our pocket chart.

After our mini lesson students begin their literacy centers and stations. My students meet with me for one of their stations. I meet with all my students every day. On Mondays we use these Word Work Mats as part of our small group phonics instruction that goes right along with the phonics skill we talked about as a class during whole group.

Word work centers are a hands on way to practice phonics instruction.

During my small group literacy instruction, each student gets a word work mat and a set of letter cards. If we are working on r-controlled vowels ‘ar’ and ‘or’ I will give half my students in my small group ‘ar’ and the other half ‘or’. Then my students will switch. I listen has my students say each word and how they segment the sounds in each word. My early finishers

Literacy Centers

I place the word work activity in a literacy center for practice and review as well. My students know exactly what to do since we use these word work activities very week. I have 5 word work centers that my students rotate through each week. There are 4-5 students in a group, so only one student goes to each word work center. My other 4 word work centers can be found HERE.