Writing Centers in the Classroom

I don't know about you, but I love a good writing center. During Writing Workshop, I like my students to practice their writing in different ways. I feel like students need to mix up their writing methods and strategies. It gives them a chance to be creative and think outside of the box.

That being said, I just found the coolest game at Wal-Mart and I cannot wait to use it as a writing center in my classroom! Have you ever seen Rory's Story Cubes? If not, you need to check them out! The set I have below is on actions. Basically, your students just roll and write! When the students are getting ready to write, they roll the dice. The actions shown on the dice need to be included in their story. The best part about this game is that you can easily modify it for any of your students. If you have a struggling writer, you can have that student roll one die. For your higher writers, you can have them roll as many dice as you want.  This game would work really well with ESOL students too since it shows actions.

This game got my creative juices going and I worked on creating some writing centers for my classroom. I wanted to create writing centers for upper elementary students that aligned with the CCSS and covered the four main types of writing; descriptive, persuasive, expository, and narrative. With the dice theme in mind, I created Write 'N' Roll. 

This pack has 21 different centers that focus on the following skills...

-Writing a Paragraph

-Story Starters

-Vivid Vocabulary

-Writing a Friendly Letter

-Narrative Writing

-Poetry

-Writing a Personal Narrative

-Persuasive Writing

-Tall Tales

-Fairy Tales

-Opinion Writing

-Expository Writing- How-To Writing

-Descriptive Writing

-Informative Writing

-Creating Comics Using Figurative Language

-Informative Writing-Writing a Newspaper Article

-Persuasive Writing- Writing a Speech

-Writing a Book Review

-Play Writing

-Song Writing

If you are looking for some fun centers for your writing time, feel free to check them out! You can download a sample center on fairy tales for free here.