This week I worked on teaching editing to my students. Teaching editing is not always easy to teach. I really try to work on creating writers that CARE about their work and want to edit. I find that is the best way to teach editing skills.
This week was a short one due to the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. You know how those “short” weeks go. They’re shorter but they feel longer and you still don’t get everything done that you’d like to!
This week we explored the concept of editing. Each morning, I have a Morning Message on the board (usually related to a SS concept or a review of something from the day before). The message difficulty level changes throughout the year. For example, it began as a simple cloze type message where students just had to fill in the blanks while I write it in. I try to focus on meaning so that students understand they are always reading for meaning. Now that that has become easy for them, I am misspelling words (and underlining the misspelling) so that my students know which words to focus on. I don’t tend to stay in this stage too long because I don’t want to reinforce the wrong spellings. This is also why I won’t misspell a word more than once. Students watch as I show them how to read and re-read and edit spelling. This week, we did a little preliminary editing. This was nothing more than peers getting together and helping each other with misspellings. As the year goes on, the editing process will grow and develop and I will share it here with you.
We also continued with our Brain training. Students worked through Mindful Brains this week and identified in their own way, what their brain smarts are. The more students know about their brains, the more they can learn. I liked looking at their brain smarts. Students had NO difficulty coming up with things they were good at. I find that my best writers are really in tune with their overall “smarts”.
To accompany this, we keep a mindful journal. Here we write about topics that have some emotional or caring impact on themselves and the lives of the people they live with and go to school with. This week’s topic was Careful Listening. I get some of my topics from this poster. (I’m really not sure where this poster is from as I’ve had it a while.) For more on Mindful Journals and a free journal cover and ruberic click here.
“You must listen carefully to show respect. If you don’t, it’s like you’re less important than me and I don’t care about you and that’s mean, so we really should listen. If we don’t, then we’re not showing any respect at all. We will miss a lot of things if we don’t listen.”
Wise words from a 2nd grader. We could all learn from those words.
Next week: More work from our Interactive Writer’s Notebooks and Mo Willems author of the week and more. Let me know what you think or leave a question. Have a great week!
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