Peachy Teachy

Once my little ones were writing simple sentences like the one in the picture above, “Somebody goes to school.”, we began incorporating various writing activities into our daily writing time to help develop their writing.

If you are interested in teaching your little one to write, see Part 1 of this blog. If they are already writing simple sentences and you want to help advance their writing, take a look at some of the writing activities we enjoyed:

• Scrambled Sentences
• Sentence Builder Cards
• More Than One Sentence
• Word Family Worksheets
• Facts About Farm Animals
• Applying Phonics Rules We Are Learning
• Color Words
• Number Words
• Holidays
• Complex Sentences
• Sequencing
• Complex Sequencing
• Don’t Forget Typing!

Scrambled Sentences

This is a writing activity from the book Scrambled Sentences by Frank Schaeffer. The objective is to unscramble and write the sentence as well as complete the picture.

Sentence Builder Cards

This sentence builder activity is the perfect way to transition to independent writing! They pick a green person/thing card (noun), a yellow card (verb), and a place card (noun) to build a simple sentence. They always glue these down in the same order (green, yellow, pink) and as a reminder I say we start our sentence with green for go, slow down for yellow, and stop for pink.

The cards are labeled, so your little one can just copy these words down. This helps them focus on capitalization, filling in sight words to create a sentence, and adding an end mark.

We did these sentence builders for writing each day until they were confident with this activity. Once my kids mastered sentence builders, I had them add an adjective in front of both nouns to make their sentence more complex.

More Than One Sentence

Once my kids were comfortable writing one sentence, we began writing two. I made sure to introduce the pronoun sight words before doing this activity (e.g. he, him, her, she, it, we, they, us, them) so they could use a pronoun in their second sentence.

When they had some practice with two sentences, we added a feeling sentence. That is a sentence that says how they feel about something. They usually put an exclamation mark to show excitement.

Word Family Worksheets

Word family activities are great because they help your child see patterns with words, which helps with reading and writing. For example, the -ig word family has words like big, dig, pig, wig, etc.

We were working on the -in word family. They sounded out and wrote the -in words and wrote a sentence for each word.

Facts About Farm Animals

Love the step by step drawing instructions and facts about each farm animal/object. This is what we used when we started reading nonfiction books and writing facts about different topics.

Applying Phonics Rules We Are Learning

We would often write sentences about a new phonics rule we were learning. If we were learning silent e words (aka magic e fairy words), we would write a sentence with a silent e in it. For example, ‘I bake a cake’.

For a list of phonics rules you can teach and incorporate into your writing lessons, see my blog Teach Your Little One to Read: Part 4.

We were learning about the H Brother (‘sh’) and Bossy R (‘or’ and ‘ar’) in phonics the week we wrote the above sentence, “The fork is sharp.”. We used writing time to review the two phonics rules we had learned. See this blog for more info on the H Brothers and Bossy R.

Color Words

Color words are a popular group of words! Your little one will use color words very often in their writing. We did tons of color word activities to help familiarize my kids with these words.

There are many cute activities to teach color words. Once we worked on color words for a few weeks, we began to write about them.

Number Words

Although your little one will probably write the number symbol when they are writing a number in their sentence, learning how to write the number words is also an important skill they will use more and more. I taught number words during our math lessons when we were learning number sense.

You can display a number word chart to help them remember how to spell these words and/or you can give them activities like the worksheets above that will provide number word writing practice.

Holidays

Kids love writing about the holidays! There are so many amazing writing activities tied to each holiday. A Pinterest search will give you endless ideas on fun writing activities.

Complex Sentences

This book was great because the lessons applied to both my kindergartener and my first grader. My son would do the fill in the blank page where he would draw the picture, write a simple sentence under the picture, and fill in the blanks at the bottom of the page

My first grader, was also writing about a fox the same day my son was, however, she was creating a complex sentence about the fox. On the fox writing sample, she filled in words for the fox and used her words to create a complex sentence underneath “Little red wood fox played in the meadow in the morning”.

Sequencing

In this activity, you cut out three pictures, glue them in order, and write a sentence for each picture. I teach the transition words ‘first’ ‘next’ and ‘last’ for this activity and write them above the pictures. We discuss commas and they add a comma after the transition words for a short pause.

This is a multiple day activity. On day one, we cut and glue the pictures and write the first sentence. On day two, we write the next and last sentence and color the pictures. You can also break this into a three day activity as well.

Complex Sequencing

For four picture sequencing, we added the transition word, ‘then’ and wrote four sentences instead of three. For five picture sequencing, we added the transition word ‘second’ and wrote five sentences instead of four. These writing activities took the whole week to complete. We usually wrote one sentence and colored one picture a day. Here are some examples below:

Don’t Forget Typing!!

Typing can be incorporated very early in the writing process. Once my kids were able to write simple sentences, my husband and I introduced them to the computer and showed them how to type sentences. They enjoyed this so much, it’s a great segue from beginner sentences.

The kids started a typing program called typing.com. I highly recommend this free website. It is a great program that tracks your child’s progress. They earn badges and awards and it takes them from beginner to advanced. My kids are currently working in the advanced section and love it.

It’s so amazing seeing my children apply their writing skills. They make signs for their forts and pretend restaurants. They make their own birthday cards for family members. They write me stories and notes. It’s one of my biggest accomplishments as a mother. Writing is a gift I gave my children that became a gift for me that keeps on giving.