Organizing your TLC

It is critical that we have our Teacher Led Center (TLC) organized and well-stocked. Your materials should be easily accessible too. And, your TLC should have much more than just a book for each student. So, what should your TLC have? Well, it depends on each group and what grade you teach. For today's post, I will focus on the intermediate grades (3-5) just to make it easy to understand. I will post about K-2 at another time. Your lower group will most likely need phonics instruction. So, begin by administering a phonics inventory. Using the data from this phonics inventory, identify the starting points of your students. Create a framework so that you make sure you cover both phonics and comprehension needs. (You can see my second post for an example.) Next, identify good phonics resources to address your group's needs. Some good resources are Elkonin boxes, letter tiles, decodable books, board games, and Lakeshore kits to name a few. Take a look at fcrr.org for many great phonics activities too. Just be sure to target the students at their phonics level, and not just look at the grade level. Target one of these resources to focus on for your phonics instruction this week. After, find a book that has several examples of this phonics skill. You should take this skill to text after you have explicitly taught it and the students had an opportunity to practice with it. After you have the phonics materials organized for this group, you must address the comprehension needs. There are numerous resources you could use. First, take a look at what your current curriculum offers. For example, we currently use Houghton Mifflin; they offer Leveled Readers, Vocabulary Readers, Theme Resources, Selection Summaries... There are so many resources! Match the Lexile levels of the group to the resource. Decide on a guided reading strategy to address comprehension issues. And, finally have some type of running record or retelling rubric to use with each student on a weekly basis. I also like to have a tracker to keep track of each benchmark I teach in the TLC. And then, there's the issue of fluency. Again, assess what you currently have in your building. There are TONS of resources. We have Quick Reads, Blast Off Passages, Six-Minute Solution, Reading A-Z, and Voyager Fluency Books. We also purchased the Sight Word Superstars Plan on TPT. Determine what your students' needs are, be it accuracy,prosody, and/or automaticity. And align the resources to the data. Now put the week's materials for each group into a separate bin or basket. Keep this at your TLC. I also like to have a binder for each group with trackers for sight words, WCPM, benchmarks, and to keep the running records for each child. Also, I keep the lesson plans for each group inside this binder, as well as their data. Lastly, have a separate area in your TLC to keep additional materials all kids can use, like dry erase boards, markers, erasers, stickers, task cards, crayons, pencils, a bell, timer, paper, and copies of graphic organizers in sheet protectors. All of this will get you off to a great start.