ideas for language arts centers - self-made

Hi,

I need some ideas on how I can create some ELA centers for 5th grade on sentence writing, sequencing, grammar.

I need to make them from scratch, I don't have $$ for books.

Thanks:thanks:

 

Have you searched teacherspayteachers for free downloads?

Might be helpful to look into the site.

 

For sentence writing, you could use sentence stretchers. I give the kids a "boring" sentence, ex. The girl was sad. They need to add adjectives, descriptive words, figurative language, etc. in order to make an exciting sentence. I was going to use a sentence logbook with several boring sentences written at the top of each page...students could then go through and choose a few to rewrite, and read some of the other student sentences, too.
I'm kinda stuck on grammar centers, too, other than the plain old revising a paragraph. :-(
For sequencing, you could do a lot with comic strips - using the "kid friendly" section of the newspaper comics to have students put them in order. Or, they could read a short story and create their own comic strip based on the most important ideas in the correct order.

 

Thanks applejax544! I like those ideas.

 

Grammar - use markers to underline parts of speech (red for noun, blue for verb, orange for adjective...) Write sentences with two verbs, one noun...Create word search with nouns...Mad Libs (you can find some online).

If/when you can afford it, Scholastic has those packages of poetry for young children books all the time. You could do a lot with those or any poetry books. Choose a line and create your own poem. Find examples of ___. Illustrate. Find ___.

 

Someone gave me a small madlibs flip pad. I tore out the pages, chose a few that I liked and glued the story to the back of the "fill in" part with a glue stick. Then I laminated them. I plan to let the kids use dry or wet erase markers to do them so they can be used over and over and over.

Thanks for the other great ideas!

 

I'm doing a literacy project for a college assignment and I came across Ms. Powell's website. She has some good ideas for literacy centers for the older elementary grades. Go check it out. www.MsPowell.com.

 

Now she has this site in addition (or more so, this is her regular website now)- http://www.thecornerstoneforteachers.com/

She has some tremendous resources; I agree!