revising and editing

Are you sometimes convinced that your students spend more time erasing than writing?  If so, I have a simple solution for you.  First, understand the reason for the erasures.  The usual explanations for this are: 1) Some students want their first attempts at writing to be their final attempts!  They hate having to write pieces over again (...and shouldn't have to do that any more than necessary!).  Also, 2) A few clever kids erase a lot so that they don't have to write.  They're likely to be the same ones who sharpen their pencils endlessly or thumb through the dictionary with abandon (if you allow it).  Here are two solutions to the problem--all too simple.  Offer pens to your students to use during their drafting.  Even the little ones love to experiment with pens.  Of course, they can't erase with pens and must learn to cross out and write above.  Another solution is to furnish lots of pencils for writing---pencils without erasers!!  Just pop those little tips off so that no one is tempted to erase.  Problem easily solved!  

Comics for your kids!

You're gonna love this web site for students of all ages: MakeBeliefsComix.com.  Students can create short comic strips, choosing their own characters, dialogue bubbles, and features and can then print out to share.  This should get all of your students thinking and even the most reluctant writers moving!  

Developmentally Appropriate...or not??

 

I thought the following was an interesting quote, worthy of some careful thought as we consider how much we should or should not be adjusting our expectations of young children.  I would love to hear your responses to this issue:   “Is there anyone with a historical sensibility who can see how vastly we’ve shifted over two or three decades in our understanding of what children need?  I believe we need to keep a historical perspective in order to see more clearly how the concept of ‘developmentally appropriate’ has been perverted into a mandate to teach things that were clearly developmentally inappropriate 30 years ago.”  Thomas Armstong, learning and human development expert.  “Historical Perspectives on What is ‘Developmentally Appropriate'," The Whole Child Blog, Nov. 18, 2010.  

Tired of nagging???

At this point in the year when you're totally tired of nagging about capital letters, end punctuation, spellings, etc., give this tip a try.   Look at your students' rough draft papers and find those students who're getting those things correct automatically.  Declare them your "experts"---"Johnny, you're an expert at using exclamation marks correctly.  Would you be our class expert for exclamations?  If anyone wonders whether they should use an exclamation mark, you can talk to Johnny during our writing workshop." The same goes for paragraph indentions, good lead sentences, great closures, super word choices, and anything you can think of that would improve students' writing at this point. You might even give them a badge to wear---Put some of those old conference nametags to good use. Take out your name and put, "Johnny, Punctuation Expert."  Kids will feel special and may all strive to be an expert in some area as well!  Having students support each other as a community of learners should be one of our classroom goals.  

field trips on NO budget

No budget for taking your students on the traditional field trips this spring ?  Well, now you can go to some exotic places for new learning experiences.  Go to www.efieldtrips.org.  This web site offers a complete field trip to some remarkable places.  You can download a travel journal which can be used to evaluate students' participation if you choose.  Then, the site will take you on a virtual trip (many great sites listed).  After the trip, there are a number of interactive options: students can post questions that will receive answer, or they can be part of a web chat about the visit.  Safe travels!  

Good Writing Lesson

For those of you preparing for upcoming writing tests--or just trying to help students improve their writing, here's a lesson I did recently that worked well with 5th graders.  I gave each student a rubber band (and led them through a group promise not to misbehave with them!).  I read through a rather bland piece of writing with little to no sentence variety.  When I re-read it, I asked students to hold the rubber bands between the thumb and index fingers of both hands.  I told them I would pause at the end of each sentence.  They were to judge whether the sentence was short/simple, medium length, or complex/longer and stretch the rubber band to reflect the length of the sentence.  For the first text, their bands stayed about the same unextended length.  Then, I read an interesting piece to them, and we repeated the activity.  This time, we all observed the bands extending and retracting constantly.  The lesson made sentence fluency and variety more concrete and visual for these students. They discovered that you don't want all long or all short sentences in a piece of writing.  Then, they looked over their own compositions, stretching the rubber bands to see how varied their sentences were.  Many discovered that they needed to revise!  Hallelujah! Let me know if you try this.