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.