Roll, Write, Rewrite

I got this idea on pinterest. I saw that someone had made a roll and revise sentence dice game here: thefirstgradeparade.blogspot.com. But, since it is not age-appropriate for my kiddo, I decided to tweak it a bit for my lesson this week.

One of my goals for this semester is to have my client write accurate and complete sentences within a narrative. After evaluating the three writing samples that I collected the past two weeks, I realized that he typically leaves out punctuation, capitalization, and cohesive devices. For this lesson, I really want to focus on the punctuation and capitalization. I also added in some long vowel pattern and past tense -ed spelling errors to see if he could catch them. 

First, I made sentence squares. Each square has three sentences that are incorrect. I'll cut the sentence squares out after I print them and glue them onto an empty Kleenex box. 

Examples of inaccurate sentences

After the kid rolls, he will correct the sentence that he lands on. First, he will go through and mark everything that is wrong. Then, we will check to make sure he has all the errors marked. After that, I'll give him a fill in the blank worksheet so that he can fix the errors without having to write all the sentences out again. He hates writing so I figured that I would limit the amount he has to do with this activity. We might not get through all the sentences in one day so it would be a nice carry-over activity.

Fill-in-the-blank editing worksheet

Favorite Things/Dice Activity

Materials Needed:

• Dice (technically only one)
• Favorite activities worksheet

So since I have never met my client before, the first session is going to consist of a lot of getting to know you activities. Since I want to make therapy as fun as possible, I need to know my kid's favorite things. I decided it would be fun to "play" a game to find out.

For the past week I've been obsessing over using dice, but not just little dice, I want to use big, fluffy dice. I got all caught up in the idea that I forgot that, low and behold, I don't own any dice... at all. I hopped on Amazon.com and quickly ordered some fluffy car dice so that they can be delivered by Monday (thank you Amazon Prime).

My fluffy dice

Since I only really need one dice (am I the only one who hates using the word di for a singular dice?) I told Holly that she can have the other. Works out great!

Back to the activity: I just spent another night doing nothing... aka making a worksheet that probably should've taken 5 minutes. It took me an hour. I know, I'm helpless. Here is the worksheet:

Don't judge the 6: long story short, I had to draw the dots by hand and I'm an unfortunate artist and too lazy/poor to make another

So the rules of the activity are pretty simple:

• Child rolls di
• Child finds the category that aligns with his/her roll (e.g. a roll of a 1 means answer about favorite color)
• Child says "My favorite color is _____"
• Rolls again

I made up extra "rounds" in case the number is rolled more than once. Also, it is nice to have a variety of favorite things in case the child can't think of a favorite in a certain category. I'm thinking that we'll play this on the floor to have a nice change of scenery.