Roll and Spin a Sentence
"How can I make this more active?"
Literacy Strategies
Reading and writing tend to be sedentary activities. While it is important for students to build stamina for practice of these skills, it is not necessary for them to be sitting for an hour. For each post-it note they write while reflecting on reading they could stand. Elementary students can find new vocabulary words in the classroom or collaborate with peers to create sentences. While creating literacy lessons framing your plan with, "How can I make this more active?" can lead to more movement in these usually sedentary lessons. Below are some strategies I have observed in Finnish classrooms.
Sentence Dash
Materials Needed: 3 colors of paper cut into strips, sentences of various lengths written on strips, writing journals and/or paper
Procedure: Students will be writing sentences. A review of what constitutes a sentence would probably be helpful. Go over what the different colors mean (different levels of challenge) and show some samples. Explain that the different colors will be clustered in different spaces. (The school I saw used the hallway since their classroom was very small). Students are to use any way of moving safely to the sentences to get one and come back to the class. Once in the class they look at the sentence, flip it over, write it, check their work, and then correct it. Repeat.
Image from Pixabay
Materials: dice, grids that are labeled with numbers at the top and that have activities in the boxes, spinners, large dice with images, writing journals and/or paper
Procedure: All of the first grade students gathered as a group for instruction about the activity and reviewed parts of a sentence. For the activity they need to use the spinner or the large dice to choose a character. They also needed to roll the smaller dice and use the grid with corresponding numbers to choose a verb that the characters were going to be doing. Afterwards they went back to their class to write their sentence. It didn’t really matter which order they went in as long as they remembered.
Word Ball Toss
Materials: exercise ball, vocabulary words, tape, optional: writing journals and/or paper
Procedure: Tape vocabulary words onto the exercise ball so they are evenly spaced. Students toss the exercise ball at the wall. When they catch it they look at the word that is facing them (or closest to them). That is the word they must ask a partner to spell, define themselves, or remember so they can record it at their seat.
Animated Reading
Materials: reading materials
Procedure: Students practice reading a story together or a Reader's Theater script. Whenever it is an individual's turn to read they squat down to read their lines. When their lines are finished they stand back up. This is for practicing, but if it is a Reader's Theater script they will might want to add different motions for the final performance.
