My teacher friend, I am here to remind you about a tried and true favorite, low prep activity your students will love: Write the room activities!
Imagine this:
You tap your fingers on your desk. You uncap your flair pen and doodle on the margins of your lesson book.
It’s your plan period and you’re trying to think of new math fact centers, decoding practice, and reading fluency stations. An idea pops into your head and you begin to write but realize this idea involves hours of mod podging pictures onto small gem stones. I mean, who has time to prep that for every single skill?
Suddenly you reach for that folder of student favorite write the room activities and… stations are ready to go (and just wait for the excitement from your students when you take out the clip boards and they see the cards hung up!)
To give a little background, in case you’ve never heard of write the room: In my classroom, write the room activities consist of task cards hung around the room with pictures or some kind of key on them. Students go on sort of a scavenger hunt around the room to find the cards that match the pictures on their recording sheets. These activities make awesome centers, warm up, or morning work activities!
There are so many things I love about write the room, but here are 3 of the major reasons I love it!
3 Reasons to Love Write the Room Practice
1.You can adapt this type of practice to almost any subject area or practice skill!
Originally I used write the room to practice our spelling words or word families. Originally this really consisted of students reading and then copying words. Soon my eyes were opened to so many more opportunities for practice including content area vocabulary, math skills and fact fluency, and even punctuation practice!
2. The format/procedure is consistent allowing for increased independence with routines.
No matter what the subject matter, the basic procedure and routines are similar! In my classroom students practice using a clipboard to move around the room. We practice all together the first few times so they know what it feels, sounds, and looks like to be appropriately engaged in this center (and let’s face it… first graders take clip boards VERY seriously!) Since the routine is pretty much unchanged, I can change out the cards and content tasks and provide challenges on a more independent basis since the students are so familiar with the procedure.
3. Kids are MOVING while they practice!
Toss out those worksheets. Kids are required to do so much “sit and produce” work as it is. Some of it is avoidable… but when we have an opportunity for our students to get up and move, to be engaged in solving, reading, or whatever the focus skill is…. let’s go for it!
Just to wrap things up, it’s worth mentioning another favorite no-prep type of resource I love, Color by Code! Check out my related post about the reasons I love color by number activities as well!
If you want to test out a write the room activity for your classroom, keeping with the LOVE theme I am offering this Valentine’s Day Write the Room activity for free (of course you could use this really any time of the year)! Click below to get this resource delivered to your inbox!
