October Literacy Centers for Kindergarten

Hello!  I’m here today to share about my brand-new October Literacy Centers for Kindergarten.  If you recall from my blog post about my September Literacy Centers, I am working on a year-long set of literacy centers that are non-thematic.  Today I’m going to share a sneak peek at all of the centers in my October pack!

There are several reasons why non-thematic centers work well.  First of all, these centers are not the only centers you have to use.  The great thing about the packs I’m creating is that you can rearrange and substitute as you wish, but the structure of the centers is still there.  For example, if you have a bunch of really great Halloween centers you want to mix in throughout the month of October, that’s great!  I absolutely LOVE my Halloween centers pack and I want to be able to use the activities.  However, themed center packs are somewhat limited in that they usually only include enough centers for you to use for about a week or two.  Plus, the great thing about following a year-long, structured, and systematic approach to literacy centers is that skills are constantly building upon one another and spiraling in a way that a) promotes student independence and b) ensures that students are continually practicing skills that have already been introduced – a.k.a. meaningful independent practice.  Which is great, because meaningful independent practice should be the goal and purpose of independent learning centers!


Another great feature of non-thematic centers is that you can rearrange them and repeat them whenever needed throughout the year.  You can introduce the activities in guided reading groups and then add them to the learning centers.  You can repeat them later in the year or use them for reteaching.


Like September, the literacy center pack for October is structured with centers divided into five areas: Sight Words, Sort It Out, Letters and Sounds, Literacy Spotlight, and I’m a Writer.  There are bin labels for these five areas and each has its own simple picture.  This helps if you use tracking tools for students to keep track of which centers they’ve completed each week, such as these cards:

I’ve included an editable version of the bin labels so you can customize them as needed.  However, if you want to keep it simple, you can use the same five bin labels all year with the activities I’ve created.

There are four weeks’ worth of activities with one activity per week for a total of 20 activities.  Here’s a look at the activities!  (This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.)

Sight Word Centers: The sight word centers are editable so you can add your own words every week!  It will automatically generate the materials you’ll need for each week, whether it’s just sight word cards to be used with sand writing or the cover-up cards.  The four activities for October are Cover-Up Cards, Hidden Picture, Playdough Stamping, and Sand Writing.

Sort It Out:  The four sorting activities for this month are -an/-ap Word Family sorting, First Sounds M/S/R/T sorting, Word or Letter sorting, and First Sounds N/B/P/A sorting.  I suggest providing a pocket chart for students to sort in, but they can also just sort at a table or on the floor.  Here’s a large pocket chart that I love and here’s a tabletop version that I have as well.  If you do use a pocket chart, you could add the header cards to the pocket chart ahead of time.

These activities also include a corresponding practice page.

Letters and Sounds: The letters and sounds centers will always remain focused on a variety of skills related to letters, sounds, and how letters and sounds work together.  That means that early on in the school year, there will be a lot of activities surrounding identification of consonants/vowels a and i, letter sounds, and beginning sound isolation.  Toward the end of the school year, the activities will be about digraphs, short and long vowels, isolation of phonemes in all word positions, and so on.  But they will continually build upon familiar skills all year so your students will be ready for those skills later on!

The four activities for this month are First Sound Cover-Up Cards, -an/-ap/-at Missing Sound Cards, Letter Building Cards, and Letter Hunt.  For the letter hunt activity, you can use any type of sensory bin.

These activities also include a corresponding practice page.

Literacy Spotlight: These activities will always cover skills in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, word families, and other important literacy areas.  The four activities for October are Syllable Cards, First Sound Vertical Clip Cards, Sticky Rhyme Cards, and -an/-ap/-at Puzzles.

These activities also include a corresponding practice page.

I’m a Writer:  Like the September pack, I’ve included a variety of options for differentation wherever possible.  The writing activities for this month are Room Scavenger Hunt, Cut/Paste Sentence, Label a Picture, and Picture Prompt Writing.  You won’t see pictures of all of the different writing page options below, but they’re in the pack!

Keep in mind that I’ve included black-and-white options for the activities so you don’t have to worry about using color ink.

You can click on the picture below to see the October Literacy Centers pack in my store.  I also have a largely discounted growing bundle of centers available!

Also, click here to find out how to try out two free weeks of centers!