Remember This?!? Series: Literacy Workstations for Pre-Beginning ELLs

Remember This?!? Series: Literacy Workstations 

For this installment of the Remember This?! Series, where we’re reminded of some oldie but goodie teaching resources, let’s look at The Literacy Workstations for pre-beginning ESL learners. These materials provide great scaffolding support and additional phonics practice for stories from Literacy Minnesota’s classic Pre-Beginning Curriculum and ESL Story Bank. The activities in the workstations help learners develop literacy skills in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. 

The curriculum, story bank and workstations work together to provide deep literacy practice for emergent readers. For example, in the Money:  Week 1 of 2 Unit of the Pre-Beginning Curriculum, there is a story called A New Bed, which can also be found in the ESL Story Bank. The Literacy Workstations contain three literacy activities for this story, A New Bed. 

There are several ways to use the literacy workstations materials. You can follow the instructions in the Literacy Workstations Teacher Handbook, or use them in any way you see fit.  

It does take some work to download the materials, prepare them and learn to use them, but once you and your learners have a routine, the preparation time goes down, and students benefit from the predictability of the routine and the extra practice with words from a familiar story. 

Important links for using the literacy workstations:

• Pre-Beginning Curriculum
• Pre-Beginning ESL Story Bank
• The Literacy Workstations
• Literacy Workstations Teacher Handbook 

Previous installments in the Remember This?! Series:

• Remember This?! Series: Classroom Videos:  Activities for Adult ESL Learners
• Remember This?! Series: Speaking and Listening ESL Instructional Support Kit
• Remember This?! Series: Citizenship ESL Instructional Support Kit

For questions or comments about this tutor tip, please contact Tutor Training Coordinator, Meghan Boyle, at mboyle@literacymn.org.