Leveraging Literacy Centers for Phonics and Fluency Skill Building in Middle School

Abstract

Phonics and fluency instruction are primarily viewed as elementary-centric skills that do not have a place in middle school, which may neglect the usefulness this type of instruction provides to older students. Literacy centers are one method for successfully teaching these skills in a middle school setting. The purpose of this paper is to provide middle school teachers with research-based, engaging practices for implementing literacy centers to improve the reading skills of their students. The skills and strategies provided in this paper will help teachers design effective literacy centers to increase students’ knowledge of phonics and fluency in the middle grades. We discuss strategies for teaching the phonics skills of syllabification, Greek and Latin roots, affixes, and etymology. We also explain strategies for teaching fluency skills such as rate, prosody, and accuracy. Providing engaging centers in the middle grades can help promote reading achievement and work to lessen the number of adolescent students who struggle with decoding and fluent reading.

Keywords:

• Middle grade
• fluency
• phonics
• centers
• literacy

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no competing interests.