5 Ways to Incorporate Writing into your Reading Centers

Reading centers are the perfect way to have your students review skills AND incorporate sentence writing! PS you don’t have to go over centers every single Monday! These are all centers you can basically use all year long - they’re differentiated and all you have to do is swap a recording sheet/cards when your students have mastered a new skill. Each month, swap out with a new monthly theme and TA-DA! Your students will be instantly engaged!

Add a Writing Center

A writing center is the perfect opportunity to give students a low risk setting to practice writing outside of Writers Workshop! I love to add real pictures each month along with differentiated writing papers like letters, postcards, lists, etc. One of my most popular resources is my Monthly Writing Center. PS this is super low prep - cut/laminate the cards, print out some paper and you don’t have to think about the center again until next month!

Sentence Scrambles

I introduce sentence scrambles when we are first learning how to write a sentence. BUT this is also a perfect center to have students practice sentence structure all year long! It is completely independent because the first word is always green and the punctuation mark is red. Students move those pieces to the front and end. From there, they move around the additional words, rereading the sentence until it makes sense. After they’ve unscrambled the four sentences, their next task is to record them on their recording sheet! Swap out each month and your students will be instantly engaged again! This is my Monthly Sentence Scramble Bundle!

Sensory Bin with Sentence Writing

Our sensory bin has tons of different options for students to do like letter recognition, tracing, sight words, etc. But my personal favorite is when students pick a sight word and have to record a sentence! This is definitely a more challenging skill to work on during center time and I love to see what they’re able to do independently!

Write the Room with Sentences

Just like our sensory bin, this Write the Room Center is differentiated in loads of ways. And you guessed it, my fav option is sentence writing! Students walk around the room, find a seasonal word and try to write it in a sentence!

Sentence Dictation at the End of Small Group

When I am meeting with students at my own teacher table, I always end our small group with a sentence dictation. Each student is given a write board and dry erase marker. Depending on the skills we are working on, I will orally dictate a sentence. The students’ job is to listen to my words and write it independently. This is a great way to watch students write - focusing on sentence structure, sight words mastered and their phonetic spelling. I use this time to also correct handwriting since we are in a small group setting. I love to use whiteboards with the handwriting “roads” during this time.

I hope these suggestions give you some good ideas how to incorporate writing into your reading centers! I have noticed that when we write throughout the day, especially in low risk setting like these, their writing confident and fluency has improved greatly!