How to Easily Set Up a Writing Center

A writing center is a super easy, low prep center your students can use all year long. This low maintenance center is the perfect opportunity for students to practice writing in a low risk setting all year long. Here’s what you need:

1. Small designated writing area

Before setting up your writing center, you need to find a small space in your classroom—preferably away from your teacher table. There will be 3-4 students here, so you don’t want their quiet conversations interrupting your small group teaching. It definitely doesn’t have to be a big space. Even just two individual desks against a wall will work!

2. Pocket chart and anchor charts

I love displaying my monthly vocabulary cards in a black pocket chart on the wall. Students can grab whatever word they’d like to use at the writing center, and then they place it back in the pocket chart when they are finished.

Anchor charts are a perfect way to help facilitate independent writing. Students will be able to reference and copy sentence stems to create their own sentence, reference the alphabet chart and refer back to their sentence checklist once they complete their writing.

3. Fun writing utensils 

Throw in some smelly markers and colored pencils and your kids will go BONKERS. Keep whatever you add to the writing center JUST here to make it extra special. They will love using these fun writing tools at the center only!

4. No space? No problem!

I get messages a lot about how they want to add a writing center in their classroom, but there’s no space. I get that—we can’t control what size of classroom we are given. Here are some ideas you could try to solve this issue:

Portable writing center: Use a rolling cart to organize writing material and keep some buckets of fun writing utensils on top. Have the top drawer of the writing cart be the vocabulary cards. Students can grab their writing paper, cards, and utensils and go back to their seat or wherever you want them to go. You could also get one of those trifold pocket charts that they could set up to display their vocabulary cards!

Set up a writing center against a wall with no table/chairs: This one has been sent to me multiple times! Teachers have set up a pocket chart with the vocab words and anchor charts. Students come here but use a clipboard on the floor.

You can grab my Writing Center Start Pack for free! After an easy set up, your writing center will be prepped for the YEAR!