I am always on a quest for fun and interesting ways to work on writing and school skills. I have been on a bit of a dice kick, so I created a writing game using dice with words on them. The game has 4 noun dice, 4 verb dice, and 4 descriptive word dice. For my younger kids, I just use dice with letters on them, and practice writing letters rather than words and sentences.
In order to practice and use visual memory with the kids, I place the dice at one end of the room, and the table we are going to be writing at is at the other end of the room. You could also use a white board for the writing portion if you want to work on some vertical surface writing.
I then have the kids either scooter board across the room and around obstacles to the word dice. I could also have them crab walk or wheelbarrow walk.
Once at the dice, they pick one dice of each type (the different types of word dice are different colors), so they will get a noun, verb, and descriptive word. They roll the dice, read their words, then they have to remember their words while they scooter board or crab walk back to the table. They write their words on the paper first thing while they are still remembering the words.
Then the kids have to think up one sentence that uses all of the words that they rolled. The sentences will be goofy and funny, but they need to use all 3 words.
It is a challenge for the kids to remember their words, and can be modified to be easier by just doing one word at a time, and go back to the dice three times to get the three words. You can make it harder by doing two dice of each color so that the kids would have six words to remember when going back to the table, and six words to incorporate into one sentence.
When writing sentences, we work on making legible letters and word spacing.
This Roll a Word activity incorporates a lot of school skills and is challenging and fun at the same time.
Materials:
- Word dice
- Digital download
- Paper
- Pencils
- Scooter board (optional)
Skills:
- Fine motor
- Handwriting
- Visual memory
- Motor planning
- Strengthening
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I do the same thing, except I use the alphabet soup game where the dice have just letters on them and the kids can either work on spelling the word we choose and then write it or sound out the letter for speech therapy artic and then write it. I have even put the letters into the Twister Hopscotch game and make them do a step command when they are looking for a letter.