Writing Ideas BINGO!

I’m happy to be able to share this great idea that has helped me to motivate student writing.

This week in our writer’s notebooks we were working on the ideas trait.  Many of my students struggle with generating ideas so I went on a hunt for something to help.

I found a great idea in this book:

I love Marvelous Minilessons! There are so many fantastic ideas in this book for teaching writing and each idea I have tried has been a hit with my students.

The lesson I did earlier this week was for Writing Ideas Bingo. I ended up making my own idea bingo cards instead of using the one from the book.  I found that some of my students couldn’t identify with a few of the original sentence stems that were on the BINGO card found in the book.

The one in the picture above is from the Marvelous Mini Lessons book.  Even though some had trouble with a few of the sentence stems they still had fun filling out the card.

Each box on the bingo card has a sentence starter for students to fill out and once they fill in all of their ideas they get to call out “Bingo”. Nothing spectacular happened when they shouted Bingo but they liked the fact that they got to call out!

The best part is that we now have a page full of writing ideas for students to use when they’re stuck.

I liked this activity so much that I created more sheets with different sentence stems.  I even made some up for several different forms of writing! Students attach these pages into their writer’s notebook and then each time they use one of their ideas they can get a sticker to put in the square.  The one in the image below is one that I made for persuasive writing.  I also made one for letter writing, informational writing, just general writing, and story writing.

I have this item in my store right now as a flash freebie! Get it fast, it won’t be up long for free!