First Grade Sentence Writing with Directed Drawing Activities

Do your students need to Practice Writing Sentences? Most first graders need a lot of practice in this area. There’s an easy fix. Check out this learning center that uses directed drawing activities to allow students to practice writing sentences using 5 different parts of speech. You’ll hit so many objectives with this one center!

Step 1: Teach students about the Parts of Speech

Start by teaching the parts of speech using resources that you already have. If you’re looking for additional materials, I created this poster and bulletin board set which can be found here (also included with the full resource – Parts of Speech Activity).

Step 2: Doodle and Practice Writing Sentences

Have your students draw a picture using the Doodle Cards. Since they get to choose the picture, they are usually excited about writing the sentences. This can get that unmotivated student writing, and then you’ll have the perfect opportunity to praise them (now you may be able to get him to write about what’s in your lesson plans).
For example: “Wow, Johnny! You’re an excellent writer. I can’t wait to see what you come up with later today when we write about _____!”

Parts of Speech with Directed Drawing Sentence Writing:

In first grade, we discuss the following parts of speech as our objectives:

Nouns
Proper Nouns
Adjectives
Verbs
Adverbs

This product covers all of the parts of speech listed above. Students are also encouraged to use proper punctuation and capitalization for each sentence they write.

Step 3: Time to Practice Writing Sentences!

Students will use the Writing Activities paper to write a sentence about their picture.

There is one coordinating activity page for each Part of Speech included with this resource. This makes a great morning work activity, and if you don’t have more time in your day to work on sentence writing, you can still get it done with this. Since there are 4 boxes, you can have your students write one sentence a day or all 4 at once. Want more fun? Let them work in partners!

Step 4: Time to Share their Drawings and Sentences

Now that they’ve used Directed Drawing Activities to Practice Writing Sentences, have them share their favorite sentence with a partner or the class. This makes for some social time that they all need. You could try the “Turn and Talk” method. Students will sit with their partners on the floor. Say, “Turn and Talk.” Allow students a specified amount of time to talk to their partner. Then say, “switch.” This will assure that both students have an equal amount of time to speak about their picture and sentence. I suggest two to three minutes each.

More Draw and Write Activities:

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I hope you found this post helpful. Don’t forget to pin the image below to your Teaching Resources board on Pinterest for future use.

Thanks for stopping by!

~ Carrie

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