mixedupdays:

A few years ago I picked up a magnetic poetry game for kids. The game turned out to be awful, so I ended up taking it apart and using the pieces seperately. The magnetic poetry went into rotation for “magnet center” (which is just the metal door to the outside, I rotate the magnet activity on it every other week), the little magnet boards became a tool for small literacy groups, and the cards you see above became part of a “Writing Ideas Box” for those times in Writer’s Workshop when a student can’t come up with their own story idea.

The kids loved the writing prompt cards, but I noticed that they would take forever looking through all the cards before choosing one, and the cards were always a jumbled mess. So a few months ago I decided to make a change and sorted through the cards looking for possible categories. I eventually came up with animals, people, food, weather, places, and ‘all about you’. I hole punched the cards and put them on rings with tags, and now when someone wants a writing prompt, they pick a category and take the ring back to their seat to choose a specific prompt. As usually no more than two, maybe three kids need a prompt at a time, this has been a great solution and has really helped with organization.

I decided that the labels needed replacing, and took pictures before I glued the new labels to the new tags (which are normally on each ring, but they were in tatters, plus I thought they would photograph more easily flat on the table).

(via englishmajormade)