Best practices to perform CRUD operations on Entities (Entity Framework)

I am trying to figure out where should I put database operation for each entity. Before this confusion, for each entity, I was doing all these database operations in a provider class. Provider class means that each class has a provider. Such as:

class Member
{
   public string FirstName;
   public string LastName;
}

class MemberProvider
{
  //Singleton
  //Do database operations

   ......

   public List<Member> GetItems(FirstName = null, LastName = null)
   {
       // run store procedure
       //this returns List<Member> if any
   }

   public Member GetItem(int? Id = null,FirstName = null, LastName = null)
   {
       // run store procedure
       //this return Member if any
   }

   ....
}

then when I need a list of member with some filtering, I do this:

 List<Member> members = MemberProvider.Instance.GetItems(FirstName = "John", LastName = "Black");

The question is how can I do all this database operations related to entity in the entity itself ? Is it good practice ? What should I read to understand this concept ?

Thanks in advance.