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I don’t know about you, but I am always looking for a way to make learning fun. There’s something about an element of fun that makes my students tackle a task with more rigor and excitement. As a kindergarten teacher, I take my students from writing letters, to writing words, to writing sentences. Then I send them off to hone their writing skills with other teachers.
There’s something magical that happens when a student has an ‘ah-ha’ moment with writing sentences; the glimmer in their eye when the world of written communication opens up. But it takes some practice to get there.
In my classroom we spend much of the year on writing sentences. One day, as we learned about the two parts of every sentence, we played a game in our circle time making silly sentences. The students loved it and the giggles filled the air as they thought of the silliest sentences they could.
Out of this sweet time of learning was born the ROLL IT Sentence Practice activity.
Using these amazing dice that you can put pictures in, my students rolled, and rolled, and rolled some of the best sentences to date.
Soon I created subject and predicate sentence cards for a variety of themes and seasons. Roll a sentence became a class favorite learning center that lasted the remainder of the year. Now I have pulled everything together in one place so that you too can inspire your young writers to shake, rattle and roll sentences.
So here’s how it works . . .
After you get your cubes just print out the subject and predicate cards. I like to have them all printed out and cut so that I can quickly choose the ones I want as I get the activity set up. However, you can also just print and the cut the cards you want.
Next, choose the level of writing you want your kids to work on. I start simple and progress throughout the year. My students start by rolling and writing one sentence. After writing each sentence part, they combine the sentence and practice using capital letters and punctuation. Then they decide if they made a real or silly sentence.
Then we move to writing 4 sentences. Students roll and write 4 sentences and add a picture to match. Not only does this help my students with sentences, but it helps me see who is having problems with reading comprehension too! Students can work independently in a learning station using the writing checklist to remind them to use capital letters, spaces and punctuation.
You can also choose more advanced options of writing like a half page of writing and half page to illustrate, or a full page of writing.
These silly sentences also make great story starters too. Students in a higher grade, or with more advanced writing skills, can roll a sentence and then use it to start their own story. These sentence cards will work well with kindergarten, first grade and second grade classrooms. With over 130 cards in this set, there are many great sentences just waiting to be written!
Once you have these versatile cubes you will find many ways to use them. My teacher friend Deedee Wills has a some wonderful math and literacy centers using these cubes too!
