Sunday 25 August 2013

Dice for Writing Exciting Sentences by Alan Peat

During 2013, we have begun using the Writing Exciting Sentences book by Alan Peat in our classrooms. We have found it to be a very useful resource and would recommend it to anyone who thinks it may be useful. As of May 2014, an accompanying app has been available.

To accompany the resource, we are about to start using dice as one way for children to, sometimes, choose which kind of sentence to write.

Idea 1: Each child has two dice. They roll them and then use this grid to decide which kind of sentence to write:

Idea 2: Cut of these cubes to make dice for the children to roll:


A copy of these documents can be found here.

Also, here's a game we made using Scratch. 

UPDATE - See our our post from 2014 about sentence dice by text type.

5 comments:

  1. These are brilliant! Thanks very much for sharing!!

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  2. Printed and looking forward to using them. Kids are really getting into them and just ordered book 2

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  3. great stuff - these sentences have made such a difference to our children's writing -
    this is an interesting way to 'play' through writing sessions.

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  4. I love the Alan Peat sentences but think that these randomised sentence activities take away the importance of actually selecting the correct type of sentence to create a specific effect in writing. I think we need to be careful to teach children how to select sentence types to build atmosphere and tension in writing rather than implying that any sentence will do.

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    1. Thanks for the reply. We have used these more as a 3D prompt/reminder about sentence types. They don't work as dice when writing, as pointed out. However, they can be quite useful for whiteboard work or a ten minute activity. Please also see our follow up post: http://primary-ideas.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/dice-for-writing-exciting-sentences-by.html

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