Magnetic Sentences: Hands-On Learning Stations

When students are learning to write a sentence, they face a lot of hurdles. First, there is the physical act of writing anything that can be tedious, especially if they have been asked to use their hand for any other type of writing that day. Then there is handwriting. Can you even read what they wrote? The final challenge is spelling. Often kids will choose a word they can spell over a better word because it's easier.

I'm focusing on Language Arts this week in my 31+ Days of Hands-On Learning Stations series, and today is all about sentence writing. What better way to practice sentence building than with magnetic words!

There are so many fun products out there for magnetic sentence building.

I love these magnetic poetry sets for kids. Specifically, this Kid Genius set has words on the front and back of the magnet. The black side has simple words, but when you flip over to the white side, a synonym for the word is given. This helps kids play with sentences while also building their vocabulary.

You can get one of these cool magnetic metal easels to build your poetry on, but we opted for the dollar store cookie sheet.

As fun as these pre-made sets are, it's pretty simple to make your own magnetic sentences set. What's even better is that you can customize your set to fit the needs of your students. I made mine with the spelling words they should already have mastered. Here's how we did it:

Make Your Own Magnetic Sentences:

Here's what you need:

• Flexible Adhesive Magnetic Sheets
• Printed page of words Download Here!
• Scissors or Paper Cutter

Start by printing of your page of words. Then peal back the adhesive backing to the magnetic sheets.

If you don't have steady hands, or the patience to be precise, then pass this next job off to someone else! My husband is great with having the patience to line it all up.

Then you just stick it down to the magnetic sheet. This will make all of your little words magnetic!

You can cut them out by hand, but it will take a while. We opted for using our paper cutter, and that worked so much better. You have to press pretty hard, and go back and forth a couple of times, but the good part is that it cuts it well enough to pull the magnets apart, but keeps them together long enough so you can cut both the rows of words and the columns. (You can download my sheet of words below!)

Once you've cut your words out, place them on a cookie sheet and set it up during the day for your kids to play with making magnetic sentences!

Check out more hands-on learning stations inspiration in my 31+ Days of Hands-On Learning series! Check out these other Language Arts station ideas:

• Poetry
• Letter Writing
• Fun With Fairy Tales
• Word Puzzles and Games
• Language Computer Games