When I first started using Daily 5, I knew I wanted to have a Writing Center. I wanted to offer my students choice in what they were writing about, but I didn’t want free writing every day, either. I took the time over the span of that school year to write enough writing prompts to give my students weekly choices when they visited the Writing Center. I used a
tabletop pocket chart and put two prompts out that my students could choose from.
I love having full page prompts to post in my Writing Center. I loved having a variety of prompts- some that were seasonal, some that
were narrative, some that were imaginative, and some that tied in with
math and science concepts we were working on!
One of my colleagues who taught right across the hall wanted to have prompts out for the whole month that her students could choose from, so I reworked my prompts to create quarter size pages to put on a ring. This was a great option for her class and easier on her- she made two sets of prompts on binder rings and then she was done for the month!
After I started selling my
prompts on TeachersPayTeachers, a teacher contacted me about them. She said she loved using them, but really wanted to start sending home writing homework with her students. She asked if I would put all the prompts on a
monthly calendar so that she could start take-home writing binders for all of her students! I loved that idea as soon as I heard it!
I also eventually added writing prompt strips for a friend who uses Writing Journals. He loved being able to have prompts ready to go that students could glue in their Journals and work on each morning during Morning Work.
All 4 of these types of prompts are available in each of my
monthly Writing Prompt sets!!
Since I only required my students to write about one prompt (they had the option to do both or do some free writing afterwards) I needed something else for them to work on. This is how my
Sentence Scrambles were born! I wanted something for my students to get continued practice with sentence structure and sentence conventions, but not in a daily worksheet.
I started adding bags of cut up sentences that they had to work to put back together. This gave them practice with remembering to first look for capitalization and punctuation and put those words where they belonged. Then they moved the other words around until their sentence made sense. They were practicing sight words and sentence fluency at the same time! They had to read it to themselves or to a partner to make sure it made sense, so this added reading fluency practice as well. I always let them illustrate their sentences, which they thought was fun (win!) and I knew they were showing me their comprehension of each sentence through their illustrations (win! win!).
These Sentence Scrambles have been such a great addition to the Writing Center and I love how engaged my students are as they work on them.
Do you have a Writing Center in your classroom? I'd love to hear about it in the comments below! What have you found to be the most successful with your students?
