During our daily literacy center rotations, students would have a writing center. The content varied throughout the year, starting with handwriting practice, sentence writing, and finally getting to do creative writing. I found it very important to practice a variety of writing skills and to have students do this daily. With center planning, I liked to keep it very simple and do similar activities each week. Here are some of my favorite Kindergarten writing center ideas to use in your classroom.
Handwriting Center Activity
Handwriting needs to be practiced throughout the entire year of Kindergarten. Rather than just teach it at the beginning of the year, I teach it weekly. During the first 26 days of school, we will practice writing a letter per day. After that, we continue to practice a different letter each week. During our whole group lesson once a week, I focus on writing that letter. We will practice using handwriting paper, as I show them explicit directions on how to write the letter. Read more about how I teach handwriting here. Then, during centers that day, they will practice that letter again using these handwriting pages. I print front to back with a graphic organizer on the backside. Students are to draw pictures or write words that begin with that letter sound. This ties in phonics practice and gives them something to do once they finish writing the letter.
Find Handwriting and Graphic Organizers in my Teachers Pay Teachers store here.
Hands-On Building Sentences
One of the best ways to help students write sentences on their own is to make it more hands-on. This sentence building activity allows students to create their own sentences by moving around the words and pictures. I typically introduce this center in Month 2 of school. First, I help them create sentence stems and fill in the end with a few words or just a picture. By the end of the year, they are able to do this completely independently, and even record their sentences. You can read more about building sentences and why this is an important step of independent writing here.
Find the Holiday and Seasonal Sentence Building Bundle here.
Journal Writing: Sight Word Sentences
One of the ways I differentiate my writing center is by using different sight words for each student or group. For this center activity, students had a journal that they wrote sight word sentences in. They would take their sight word list, write a sentence for one of the words, then draw a picture to match.
This journal below is similar to the journal my students used:
Creative Writing: Picture Prompts
Picture prompts are used to help students think of what to write about. Each week, they would have a new set of pictures to choose from. You can read more about Picture Prompts and how I used them in my classroom here.
Find the Holiday and Seasonal Picture Prompts plus Writing pages in my Teachers Pay Teachers store here.
Weekly Writing Prompt
At the end of the week, students would have a weekly writing prompt based on the essential question of the week. We used the Reading Wonders curriculum, so all of these question prompts are from there. At the beginning of the year, we would do this activity as part of the whole group writing lesson, until they are able to do this independently.
If you don't use Reading Wonders, you can always come up with your own weekly writing prompts based on the story of the week, what you are learning at school, or theme/topic you are learning. For example, in September, you might write, “What is your favorite way to eat an apple?” We did this as part of our writing lesson some weeks!
Each day of the week, my students would do one of these center activities during their writing center. It made planning writing centers quick and easy! Let me know what Kindergarten writing center ideas you will try!
You can find more writing activities in my Teachers Pay Teachers store here.
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