SAVE ON WINTER FAVORITES
Hey teachers! We are well into our writing center series. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find links to the first four blogs all about setting up a writing center that lasts all year. In this post, we’re discussing which lined paper for kids is appropriate for your students.
If you’ve ever given a kindergarten or a first-grade student an independent writing assignment and gotten a look of anxiety right back, you’ll know what we’re going to talk about. Giving your students the right paper to write independently at your writing center is important. Here are three reasons for putting the right lined paper for kids at your writing center.
Some of your students are ready to write sentences, and some are ready for paragraphs. You will also have students just learning to combine letters to make a word. Your students are not one-size-fits-all. We can’t give each student the same independent writing activity. It’ll be rough. You’ll cry. They’ll cry. Don’t do it.
Whatever the topic, you’ll want a few types of kindergarten or first grade lined paper. Your students are moving from writing single words to full sentences, and you’ll want to accommodate both. Here are a few options:
We want our activities to be different so we don’t have bored students at our writing center. Bored students at an independent literacy center is a recipe for disaster. Even the most entertaining learning game will get stale after a while, so it’s a great idea to mix things up.
Switching out the types of kindergarten or 1st grade writing paper you have can help your writing activities stay fresh. It’s important to keep all types of paper available for your students. But here are some ways you can change up your writing paper to make it fresh:
The thing I love about my writing center is how many activities you can offer your students to help them practice different writing genres. When your students get older, they can create these without a template.
But in the meantime, let’s help them out. Our goal is to have our students fall in love with writing, not format their papers correctly. Here are 5 great writing ideas you’ll need a template for:
These writing activities are sure to add that interest that will help your students fall in love with writing.
This is where I mention the amount of photocopies you’ll make. You’ll want to conserve your writing center supplies, but you need primary lined paper for kids. There’s no getting around this, best practices is pencil and paper.
I’m a “green teacher” as much as I can be. We recycle, we have Earth Day activities, all the good things. And I do my very best to conserve paper. But, I knew I wanted a lot of different writing activities at my writing center, which meant more paper. So, I looked at other ways to reduce my use of paper. My rule was for every set of copies I made for my writing center, I had to figure out which copies to replace with another paper-less alternative. Here’s what I did:
We briefly mentioned booklets. This is when a parent helper comes in handy. You need a cheap ream of paper. I get mine from Walmart for about $4.00. Look for the absolute cheapest stuff. It’ll work just fine. Set your helper up with a paper cutter, a stapler, and a gift card to Dunkin Donuts. Make sure to make half-page books as well as quarter-page books
Seasonal lined paper for kids is also fun to add to your writing center. Your students can color the border and voila, you have an easy published piece of writing.
These seasonal writing paper sets are available on Literacy Stations; check them out here.
Now that you know why it’s important to add many types of lined paper for kids to your writing center, take a moment to think about the paper you have at your writing center already. How can you adapt it? Can you add lines? Can you add space for a picture? Once you provide all the different variations of lined paper, you’ll see some really great writing from your students.
Setting up a writing center gets a lot easier when you have the right materials. Here are some more posts to help you make your writing center run smoothly.