Spelling, reading, and writing are three of the most important skills children will learn in their first few years of school—that’s why having access to an assortment of first grade writing worksheets will make your life easier as a parent or a teacher. By the time students reach first grade, many have started learning basic words and are able to write basic ideas out on paper. The writing worksheets below offer a variety of different activities for all skill levels and help students focus on essential writing skills and develop them. Worksheets are great support for learning through practice—the unique offerings and the classic activities alike will create a strong foundation to build on!
Table of Contents
- What Should a First Grader Be Able To Write?
- Best First Grade Writing Worksheets
- Should First Graders Be Able To Spell?
- Check Out These Additional 1st Grade Resources
What Should a First Grader Be Able To Write?
First grade introduces the basics of spelling, grammar, and vocabulary to students. As they practice all of these skills, they’ll inevitably grow as writers. First grade teachers want to see kids who can write simple, complete sentences. They should ideally be using proper capitalization and end punctuation.
Even if their spelling isn’t perfect, the ability to use their knowledge of letters and letter sounds to take an educated guess is really what teachers are looking for. First graders should also be adept at copying down words and sentences provided to them, and able to produce their own simple sentences from scratch.
In partnership with Teach Simple, whose marketplace is full of educational materials created by actual teachers (plus 50% of all revenues go to them), I’ve gathered 23 totally-awesome grade 1 writing worksheets to help inspire your students and support their core language arts skills!
Best First Grade Writing Worksheets
- You Write The Story Soccer Picture Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
This writing worksheet offers students the chance to practice writing using a visual prompt. The use of visuals supports learning and aids students in idea generation. This 1st grade worksheet will help you teach brainstorming and the elements of a story.
- Other Ways To Write Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
This worksheet may seem like it is just focused on writing, but it also engages essential critical thinking skills. Understanding that writing is a process that can happen on paper or on a computer will set your students up for success well beyond first grade!
- Search The Word By Worksheet By Splash Learn
Search the word by Worksheet is aimed at enhancing children’s literacy skills, particularly their familiarity with common sight words. Through an engaging, picture-based activity, it encourages learners to identify and understand the usage of a specific sight word in various contexts. The exercise is designed to improve reading fluency, speed, and comprehension, making it a valuable tool for early literacy development.
- Capitalization Errors Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
There are many elements of grammar that students need to learn throughout elementary school, but capitalization is truly fundamental. Catching errors is a fantastic practice to reinforce learning! This worksheet will certainly engage your reader and support their knowledge of grammar as they fix the errors in seven different sentences.
- Writing About Me Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
Cultivating a strong sense of self and identity is an important element of social-emotional learning for young children. This worksheet blends together writing, spelling, and those SEL elements to create an engaging and fun activity where students can write about someone they know very well!
- In My Own Words Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
Summarizing paragraphs and retelling narratives with a focus on key information are essential skills. They support not only reading and reading comprehension but also critical thinking as a whole. This worksheet asks students to retell four different quotes in their own words and offers particularly effective practice for your first grader!
- Once Upon A Pancake For Younger Storytellers — Creative, Interactive Activity Book For Kids From A Story Book Day
This workbook is full of writing prompts and unfinished stories to spark kids’ creativity and enhance their writing by finishing up each one. This workbook is a fun way for children to develop their reading, writing, and storytelling abilities, using prompts about superheroes, friendships, magic, and more!
- “I” Handwriting Practice B By Have Fun Teaching
Handwriting is key to academic success and legibility is a key part of writing in the first grade. This simple worksheet let’s students practice uppercase and lowercase “I” handwriting while also constructing sentences starting with I or making silly sentences that only use “i” words.
- Journal Writing Prompts By Minds And Heart
Whether you need beginning of year writing activities, literacy centers, morning work, or early finisher work, these prompts will work for any time! With a checklist to self-edit for capitals, punctuation, and details, students will be reminded to utilize the components of strong writing that they are learning every day.
- You Write The Story Artist Picture Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
This worksheet offers another delightful visual writing prompt—this time about some artists and a dinosaur. The benefits of the visual prompt paired with the writing practices will lead to fun and learning all at once!
- Draw A Story Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
Kids love to draw, and visuals are wonderful supports for reading and writing. This worksheet blends the two and guides your little author through the process of creating a story and illustration of their very own.
- My Opinion The Big Orange Splot Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
Opinion writing includes elements of informational texts. This worksheet asks first graders to think critically about the prompt, practice writing, and focus on their opinion of the characters and plot of the story.
- The Big Orange Splot From Art with Mrs. F
- Capitalization And End Punctuation Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
A sentence has distinct features to indicate where it begins and where it ends. Early literacy skills focus on these text features to support students in their grammatical understandings. This practice worksheet is a wonderful resource for emerging readers and writers to practice capitalization and end punctuation on different types of sentences.
- Comprehensive Language Arts Skills Practice Test For Grade 1 By Twin Sisters Digital Media
Knowing where your students are is important to tracking progress. These worksheets are designed to be used as a practice test, focusing on core writing and reading skills. Ranging from punctuation and grammar to story structures and more, this is a great assessment tool to check in on your student’s learning.
The worksheets in this bundle include topics like:
—Consonant Sounds
—Vowels
—Blends and Digraphs
—Compound Words
—Contractions
—Synonyms and Antonyms
—Adjectives
—Sequencing and Story Mapping
—Capitalization
—Punctuation and Grammar
- Writing Sentences Printable Workbook By Twin Sisters Digital Media
A simple but useful tool, this sentence writing practice looks at the writing basics younger students need to learn and focuses on each one!
- Writing Conventions And Applications Printable Workbook By Twin Sisters Digital Media
Make learning more fun with a variety of activities and games related to all things about writing conventions! This set features various types of practice with nouns, verbs, plurals, subject-verb agreement, adjectives, statements vs. questions, capitalization, punctuation, complete sentences and beginning/middle/end-story structure. Packed in a set of unique worksheets, this practice is fun and effective.
- Describing Emotions Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
This worksheet is a double whammy! Not only are you getting engaging writing practice, but you will also be supporting students’ emotional learning. A simple but effective way to ask kids to write about their own feelings in descriptive words.
- Make Sentences With The Sentence Maker By Guinea Pig Education
A choose your own adventure of sorts, this worksheet allows students to piece together words and create sentences. A fun and tactile tool, this activity encourages students to be creative while offering a support scaffold and building a solid foundation for writing sentences on their own.
- Silly Stories Story Starters By Have Fun Teaching
Who doesn’t love a silly story? Inspire your students to flex their imagination with this worksheet full of story starters. They’ll have ideas to jump off from and will practice writing while being creative and thinking of stories that are outside of the box.
- Scholastic Success With Writing, Grade 1 By Worksheetbee
This comprehensive writing workbook from Scholastic focuses on several different parts of writing skills in 1st grade including identifying sentence parts, building sentences, sequencing, writing descriptive sentences, and identifying story parts.
- Star Wars Workbook: 1st Grade Writing Skills From Workman Publishing
Get kids hooked on writing by providing them with writing activities about their favorite characters from Star Wars. This workbook is aligned with Language Arts Common Core Standards and combines editorial quality, fun presentation, and the rigorous educational standards that Workman applied to the Brain Quest Workbooks as well.
- Space Poetry Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
This charming worksheet is a perfect way to practice poetry and tie in science. The creative writing elements and cross-curricular connections make this a wonderful resource for your first grader to think about how to write a poem about space.
- Uppercase And Lowercase Letters Worksheet By Have Fun Teaching
Having two versions of each letter can be a weird concept to wrap your brain around as a child. This set of practice worksheets around the basics offers a quick and easy way to support students in understanding the difference. It also serves as handwriting practice making it a double whammy!
- Capital Letter Examples Worksheets By Have Fun Teaching
Let your students apply what they know with this worksheet. A little more capitalization practice can’t hurt, and with this sheet you can easily check their understanding of the concept before you move on from the topic.
Should First Graders Be Able To Spell?
The answer is yes and no. We want our first graders to be able to spell out CVC words they’ve memorized and can identify by sight. They should also have a handle on some decodable words—mostly those that can be broken down into their composite letter sounds.
Complex, compound, and trickier letter combinations are not going to be words teachers expect first graders to spell correctly, but with practice they will come! Using these first grade writing worksheets will support your students in becoming proficient readers and writers in tandem with developing spelling skills they’ll need for second grade and the rest of elementary school.
Check Out These Additional 1st Grade Resources
About the Author
Ali Pierce has been a proud public school teacher for nearly a decade. An English teacher by day, Ali works with educators throughout K-12 in a variety of coaching and support roles. A proud Wildcat, Ali earned both her BA in Creative Writing and M.Ed. in Teaching and Teacher Education from the University of Arizona. When not teaching, Ali can be found hanging out with her two young sons and sneaking in some reading for fun.
