DIY Sentence and Story Cubes

If you're like me, you don't have a lot of money to spend on the expensive "story starter" kits offered through the various teaching supply websites. Neither does my school have the money to buy them. In addition, some of the cubes will get lost before the year's end.

As you've probably noticed, I do a lot of DIY (Do It Yourself), that work just as well. I thought I'd share with you what I do. Over the years I have accumulated a lot of stamps. Using plain wooden 1-inch blocks (available cheaply at hobby shops or dollar stores), I made my own story/sentence cubes.

Writing Sentences With Newspapers!

With the end of the year looming, and all the paperwork/inventory/testing involved that needs to be done (and no assistant), there's little time to actually teach class. Many teachers resort to playing movies in their rooms, but I don't like doing that. I want the students to still learn. So I came up with this activity that the children literally jumped on.

I gave each child a sentence strip and a page of the newspaper. I instructed them to write me a sentence telling me what they wanted or planned to do this summer. Then they had to "write" the sentences again using words from the paper. (If they couldn't find the word intact, they could cut and paste letters together to spell the words.)

The results were fun and often funny. Braedyn's sentence reads, "I am going to the aquarium."

Writing Sentences, But Differently

I've done this with the class as a whole a few times, just so they get comfortable with it. Next week they'll be on their own.

Basically, I give them a simple five- or six-word sentence. Underneath it are blank lines.

First they take the first word, (ex: Meg), and substitute a new name (ex: Bill), followed by the rest of the sentence as is, and write it on the first line.

Second line, they change only the second word (ex: bit), while writing the remainder of the sentence as is.

Third line, third word - fourth line, fourth word - fifth line, fifth word. You get the idea.

(For fun, to challenge my more advanced students, they got to write the "hidden" sentence" on the back of the paper, which was using all the words they substituted in. Ex: "Bill threw a  cold toast.")

Sentence examples:
A frog sat on a log.
Did you see the duck?
My mom can make cupcakes.
Bob saw the red bug run.
She has a big purple crayon.