Unscramble, Write, and Draw

It is important to have a few Goldilocks tasks in your teaching reservoir. These are quick assignments that your students should find neither too hard nor too easy. These are just right tasks.
Here is one that I have found to be particularly useful for students still mastering sentence writing.
The task involves reading the words on the page and putting them in order to form a proper sentence. With just the scrambled sentence, this could be a difficult assignment. However, there are a few hints that will help your students be successful.
Here is an example.

The student need to write the sentence in the correct order, “The tree has lots of leaves.”

As you can see, the capital letter is a great starting point. If we constantly reinforce that sentences must begin with a capital letter, the students automatically know which word to start out with. They can then use the picture to help them figure out what the sentence should be.
Once they have printed the sentence, they will need to complete the picture to show that they have understood what they have written. For the above picture, the students need to draw leaves on the branches. 
This is a great activity for so many reasons. It is a perfect Goldilocks task that my students have never complained having to do.
In fact, I ran out of worksheets to hand out. I tried to find a similar book to keep this task on the daily agenda but I couldn’t find one.
That was when I challenged my students to create some of their own. Here are some of the ones we came up with.
“Look out for that huge wave!”
“The race care is number five.”
“I am skateboarding on a ramp.”
I plan on creating an entire year’s worth of these Unscramble and Draw worksheets. My students are excited about helping me create them as well.
Try creating some of these for your classroom. If you do, please send them my way. I’d love to see what you come up.
If you have a great tip, resource, lesson plan, brilliant classroom idea, or anything else you’d like to share, I invite you to write a guest post. It’s quick, easy, and painless. It will also give you a great place to show potential or future employers what you do in the classroom. Teachers helping teachers is what this is all about.  
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