FCRR: the Free, evidence-based Literacy curriculum you've never heard of

Are you an SLP or special educator who works with kindergarten through middle school-aged students? Are you looking for evidence-based activities that will work for language, articulation, fluency, and social skills goals? What if I told you that such activities exist, and better yet, that they are FREE? The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) has developed activities geared for students in kindergarten through 5th grade, although I have successfully modified them to work with preschoolers through 8th graders.

Each section within Phonological Awareness (Phonics for Kindergarten), Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension has between 30 and 60 activities that go along with it. As you can see, these activities are comprehensive! I love to use the K-1 Phonological Awareness activities for my articulation kiddos. From any of the activities, you can choose words based on your student's needs. For example, I use the Phonological Awareness activity PA.003, "Rhyming A Lot-Oh" bingo activity for my articulation students all the time. 

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​Background
In 2004, The Florida Center for Reading Research staff began to create materials that teachers could implement as center activities. The team reviewed research and created materials that could be used in kindergarten through 5th grade classrooms.

Contents
Each grade set (K-1st grade, 2nd-3rd grade, and 4th-5th grade) includes 2 book sections (Phonological Awareness/Phonics and Fluency/Vocabulary/ Comprehension) that contain activity plans and activity master sheets, some of which are ready for immediate use, as well as a Teacher Resource Guide. The Resource Guide offers insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials. The (optional) instructional video explains how to prepare and implement the centers and gives specific details about the activities.

​Below is how I use some of the activities in articulation therapy: 

​I simply choose the bingo board that has words with their target sound/s. Below is one I use for /r/, with words like king/ring; rug/bug; grass/gas, etc. I choose to write the words on the cards and board to add a little extra reading practice. 

I also love "Morpheme Structures: Compound Words" , activity PA.097 in the K-1 Phonological Awareness book for the same reason- pick a target sound/s and choose those cards to work on. ​

For the above cards, I was targeting /l/ blends and /r/.

For the older students, I really love the Prefix-O game, V.001 in the K-1 Vocabulary book, and my kiddos loved it too. I used it with my confident readers, which is generally middle school and above. My secret weapon was to use small candies (such as M&M's or a small wrapped candy) as bingo chips. Amazingly, my kiddos asked to play this again and again, while working on morhphological skills. 

​You can visit the FCRR site here; simply choose the age range you want under Student Activities on the right side menu and it will take you to the page where you can choose which book to download. 

I will caution that because they contain so much information, these are LARGE files! When I first started using them, I thought it would help to print each book out at once...bad idea. Now I have 6, 3-inch binders FULL of materials taking up a lot of shelf space. If you're short on space and/or don't have half a dozen enormous binders, you can print each activity as you need it. I like to laminate them for repeated use. 

As you can see, this is an amazing resource that I've barely scratched the surface of here! Let me know what you think in the comments!