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These are cool!

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When you ask your students to do peer review of their writing, do they stare at you with puzzled expressions? Here are five specific, hands-on approaches to peer conferencing that your students can really sink their teeth into.

Revising and editing a peer's writing helps students learn to work as a team. It also gives them a fresh perspective on the proofreading process that will help them become more aware as they write and edit their own work. So, how can you make the peer review and editing process engaging, meaningful and fun for students? Here are five ways to get your students excited about peer review that actually work!

1. Neon Revision Many kids don't know what or where to mark when reading another student's work. Neon revision is an approach that can really help. First, give each student or pair of students three highlighters and these instructions:
Highlighter Markers: 3 Colors
Yellow - Mark the first word of each sentence. Questions to think about: Is there variety? Does the writer use transitional words? Are there any sentence fragments or run-ons?
Pink - Highlight each adjective. Think about: Is the writing descriptive? Are the adjectives strong and specific?
Blue - Highlight each verb. Think about: Are there too many "to be" verbs? Are the verb choices strong?

Students begin by highlighting specifics. Then, remind them to look at the big picture. After highlighting, they can make comparisons and add suggestions about what the student needs to add, adjust or remove. Proofreading will come later. First, they are helping a peer with sentence fluency and word choice-both descriptive language and "showing without telling."

Teach students about the revision sandwich: compliment, suggest, correct. Remind students that when reviewing someone's work, always start out by saying what they like about their work. Next, they make a suggestion and converse with their partner. Students ask questions. Then, they make corrections. By working together, they both learn from each other.

2. Writing Wheel Checklist Have students assemble their writing wheels using this template, a piece of plain paper and a brad for the center. To assemble, cut out both circles and attach with the brad. Explain that they will use the writing wheel checklist to help them edit one another's writing. Students should do each task on the wheel as they review another's work. The writing wheel checklist is portable, so students could even check their peers' writing from home on a class blog! Students can post their writing on a kid-friendly blogging site such as Kidblog or Weebly, where peers can write comments. Using their writing wheel as a reference, students will know how to assess their classmates' compositions for conventions.
Click here for a PDF of the Writing Wheel Checklist.

3. Revising vs. Editing (What's the Difference?) Students need to know the difference between revising and editing in order to help refine their peers' writing. Revising makes writing better. Editing makes writing correct. A popular approach in many classrooms is to use the acronyms ARMS (for revising) and CUPS (for editing).
Revising (The big picture)
Add words and sentences (be descriptive, capture all ideas).
Remove words and sentences (be concise).
Move words and sentences (sentence fluency, organization).
S ubstitute words and sentences (word choice, voice).

Editing (Conventions)
Capitalization
Usage (Verbs and nouns-does it make sense?)
Punctuation
S pelling

To help students with their understanding, say you use your arms and hand to hold your ear to help them remember that when you revise, you want the writing to sound better. If you punch a hole in a cup and look through it, you are using your eyes. This will help them remember that when you edit, you want your writing to look better. Students could even create a telescope made out of a paper cup and call it their Revisoscope! Check out Busy Bee Kids Crafts to see how to construct one. Once students know the difference between revising and editing and have the acronyms memorized, they can jot them down on a Post-it note when checking a peer's writing. The acronyms will remind students of what to look for and how writing can be improved to make it look and sound better!

4. Proofreading Spectacles Put your proofreading spectacles on, it's time to edit! To make editing for conventions fun, have students wear crazy glasses with the lenses popped out of them. It will motivate students and encourage them to look closely at their peers' writing. Remind students to always reread to check for misunderstandings in writing. You can purchase glasses at the dollar store or a party supply store. You could also have students create their own glasses out of paper.

5. Switch! Revising and Editing Stations
Set up six stations around the room. Label each station with one of the following titles:
1. Word Choice
2. Ideas and Content
3. Organization
4. Sentence Fluency
5. Voice
6. Conventions
Print out Be the Editor task cards for students to use when revising and editing at each station. Students use Zaner-Bloser's task cards to help them discuss and check one another's writing! The task cards provide the children with prompts, making editing/revising easier. By concentrating on one writing trait at a time at each station, students will not feel overwhelmed. Along with the task cards, put out highlighters, sticky notes, colored pencils and other writing utensils to keep students interested.

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5 Peer Editing Strategies That Actually Work For Student Writers - We Are Teachers

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When you ask your students to do peer review of their writing, do they stare at you with puzzled expressions?[...]Continue Reading

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look at list, of course she's selling stuff...

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Written by Cassie (Teach Starter)
Posted Thursday January 25, 2018

Editing. It's basically the literary equivalent of washing the dishes after you eat. The people who love doing it are few and far between. #itsyourturn Given that editing is a bit of an undesirable activity, helping your students improve their proofreading and editing skills can be a challenge! However, we know that great teachers do everything they can to improve their students' editing skills. And you guys are great teachers. In fact, these 20 Editing Worksheets were one of the most popular Teach Starter resources of 2017!
So, what is the best way to teach students how to edit? Is it possible to help kids learn to love proofreading and editing?
We say yes!

Okay, maybe...

Look, we'll certainly give it our best shot!

How to Teach Proofreading and Editing Skills

The most important thing you can do is to ensure your students are editing from day one of the school year so that they know it's part of the writing process.

While editing practice worksheets like the one pictured above certainly have their place in the classroom, we all know that humans learn more easily when the circumstances they are learning in are less forced and more authentic. Just like putting clothes in the washing basket instead of leaving them on the floor becomes a simple habit (with practice), editing their own writing needs to be a regular and explicit expectation in the classroom. So, finding ways to embed editing practice into your students every day in an authentic way, is so important.

7 Tips for Teaching Editing

Here are our top tips for teaching editing in the classroom.

Providing your kids with the time and the right scaffolding to practise their editing skills is important.

1. Look for the Great!
One of the biggest barriers to editing motivation is the feeling that the process is simple to find all that is wrong... What a depressing perspective! Encourage your students to use one colour for editing and another colour to identify the parts of their writing that are excellent just the way they are.

2. Edit a Copy
Have your students edit a copy of their work. You can make a photocopy to edit with a highlighter or a different coloured pencil. Or, if they are working on a computer or tablet use a duplicate file to mark up any changes.

3. Read it Aloud
Reading aloud is a fabulous way to identify grammar, spelling and punctuation errors. It's also a skill that they can take with them throughout their life's writing journey, at any time they need to independently check a piece of their own writing.

4. Edit the Next Day
Stepping away from a piece of writing makes it far easier to see any errors. When you've been looking at the same words for a while, they become too familiar and mistakes are easier to miss. Trying making editing yesterday's work the first part of today's writing lesson.

5. Peer Editing Helps Students Learn to Love Mistakes
Helping students learn to value the process of editing often requires a shift in mindset. The ways in which you ask students to practise their editing skills needs to reinforce the perception that making mistakes is normal/desirable/an awesome part of creating anything at all! Making peer editing (where students edit each other's work) helps to cement this perspective. When students see that everyone makes mistakes in the writing process, they will feel less insecure or embarrassed about finding their own.

6. Use Supporting Resources
Use high quality supporting resources such as a thesaurus or grammar guides to ensure students are learning the correct way to fix mistakes and improve their writing, rather than simply guessing.

7. Make it fun!
Washing up is always more fun when there's music on to dance-wash. Tidying up is more fun when it's a race to see who can finish first. Be creative in the way that you make editing a part of your students' every day. Use a rainbow of highlighters to mark different types of corrections or go outside and let students sit under the trees while they edit their own or a peer's work.

Get strategic about how you make sure editing is an EASY (and a non-negotiable) part of your students' writing process. Using some of the following editing skills resources will help to make editing a visible and familiar class time expectation.

Editing Checklists

At the beginning of the year, print, copy and cut a large stash of editing checklists. When you know the text types you will be teaching that year, find the editing checklist to match and have them ready to go.

Then, for example, when you begin teaching persuasive writing, make the persuasive writing checklists accessible to your students on a daily basis. Ensure they know that they can go and get one of the checklists at any time to help with their self-editing process.

You can also use editing checklists for peer editing too.
Here are some of our printable editing checklists. You can check out the full collection of editing teaching resources for even more text type checklists.
Editing and Writing Process Posters

Making a considered decision about what kind of information and which posters will adorn the limited space on your classroom walls is important. If you want to make sure editing is at the forefront of your students' minds when writing in your classroom, use these posters to bring the writing process into focus.

This Editing and Writing Process Posters download contains a blank editing poster so you can draw the notations that your school uses.

Here's a selection of our editing and proofing posters. You can search the entire editing teaching resource collection by year level to find the resources that are best for your students.

These Editing Passage PowerPoint s are another versatile editing skills teaching resource. Each PowerPoint contains 20 passages with errors in need of correction, as well as slides containing the corrected passages.

With a downloadable, editable PowerPoint for every year level from Years 1 to 6, aligned to the curriculum, you can choose the best way to use this resource in your classroom.
As a whole class activity:

Project a slide onto the board for your whole class to read and copy correctly into their books.

Throw a ball to a student who has to identify an error within a time limit (e.g. 10 seconds). If they can't find an error, they pass the ball back to you for you to throw to another student.

As an individual, or literacy rotations activity:

Edit the PowerPoint so the slides have a light background and a darker font. Print each slide in landscape A4 size and laminate for students to write corrections on using a whiteboard marker.

Upload the passages to an app like Seesaw for students to mark corrections using an iPad or tablet.

How do you make editing a part of your students' every day?
Share your tips and ideas in the comments below!

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30 Resources and Tips to Help Your Students Love Editing - Teach Starter Blog

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Written by Cassie (Teach Starter) Posted Thursday January 25, 2018 Editing. It's basically the literary equivalent of washing the dishes after you eat. The people who love doing it are few and far between. #itsyourturn Given that editing is a bit of an undesirable activity, helping your students improve their proofreading and editing skills can be a challenge!

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These are good!

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What is editing? Ruth Culham of the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory separates revision ( last month's column topic) from editing (spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation). Author Ralph Fletcher agrees. Others, like Lucy Calkins, make a distinction, but marry the two. They all agree that, when correctness and conventions are absent, no matter how powerful the message, it will never come through.

Move students away from finding what's wrong with their papers and acknowledge the intelligence behind an error. As a teacher, you can make editing meaningful by:

Searching for mini-lesson topics among the common errors students make. Show examples in actual published and unpublished text. Give them ways to remember and let them practice. Understand their logic for the editing decisions they make.

Never penalizing a student on a concept or rule you haven't taught. Phyllis Frus of the Sweetland Writing Center helps find a balance: "Marking all over a paper is likely to overwhelm . . . Limit your comments to three." Identify those and require students to become detectives, finding other errors alone.

Letting students practice on someone else's writing first. It is easier to see others' mistakes. Have fast-paced competitions to find the most errors in a practice piece. Then, set up peer-editing pairs. When students suggest corrections on another's paper, they must explain why.

Breaking editing into manageable chunks. If punctuation is a problem, isolate a student's first review to that. Encourage students to slow down or read their pieces aloud. Provide them with individualized checklists or "blooper logs" they help create to refer to as they write and edit.

Finally, remind students that they edit best when they lay their text aside for a bit and return with fresh eyes. Even those experienced writers who seamlessly flex between writing, revision and editing benefit from that approach. What we must keep in mind at all times is, as Arthur Plotnik, author and editor, reminds us: "We write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside. We edit to let the fire show through the smoke."

Known as the "Literacy Ambassador," Cathy Puett Miller uses her library science degree from Florida State University as the foundation of her work. With more than ten years experience as an independent literacy consultant working with teachers, parents, librarians, and non-profit family-friendly organizations, she has conducted research initiatives and best practice studies in the areas of beginning reading instruction, emergent literacy and volunteer tutoring. She currently is listed on the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse Registry of Outcome Evaluators.
Cathy's freelance writing appears in such print publications as Atlanta Our Kids, Omaha Family, and Georgia Journal of Reading, and online at Literacy Connections, Parenthood.com, Education World, the Reading Tub, The National Education Association, and BabyZone. She also reviews children's books at Children's Literature Comprehensive Database. Her signature is her passion for connecting children and families to positive, powerful experiences with reading; she believes there is a book for every child.
Cathy lives with her husband, Chuck, eighteen-year-old son, Charlie, and lots of friendly, ferociously read books in Huntsville, Alabama. Visit Cathy's Web site at The Literacy Ambassador.

Article by Cathy Puett Miller
Education World
Copyright 2008 Education World

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Strategies for Teaching Editing | Education World

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What is editing? Ruth Culham of the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory separates revision ( last month's column topic) from editing (spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation). Author Ralph Fletcher agrees. Others, like Lucy Calkins, make a distinction, but marry the two.

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Peer editing tutorial slides and follow up work

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Peer editing tutorial slides and follow up work

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Explain peer editing grades 3-5

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Peer Edit With Perfection: Effective Strategies

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Do students' eyes glaze over when they try to edit their own writing? Give them a fresh perspective with peer editing. Students are introduced to a three-step strategy for peer editing, providing (1) compliments, (2) suggestions, and (3) corrections in response to a sample of student writing.

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During third grade, children are really flexing their "idea" muscles and learning to express those ideas in more sophisticated ways. Sentences are getting longer and more complex. Kids are learning to use a dictionary to correct their own spelling. Grammar improves; for example, you'll see appropriate punctuation, contractions, and correct subject-verb agreement.

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printable

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Reading Rockets

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It's an important part of the writing process.

Revising gives students an opportunity to reflect on what they've written.

Revising is a way to learn about the craft of writing.

Revision is closely tied to critical reading; in order to revise a piece conceptually, students must be able to reflect on whether their message matches their writing goal.

How to teach revising

Research on revision and the quality of writing shows that strategy instruction is very powerful. When using strategy instruction, teachers should do the following:

1. Explain the revising process explicitly: provide specific, meaningful goals for the revision and/or clearly identify the audience.

One way to make the criteria very specific is to focus on genre. For example, when teaching narratives, develop a simple checklist that aligns with good narrative writing. For example, ask students "Are all the story elements included? Are the characters clearly described? Does your story show how characters feel?"

Another approach focuses not on genre, but rather overall qualities such as clarity and detail. For example, "Is there anything that is difficult to understand?" "What vocabulary words could you add to make the story more interesting?"

2. Model the strategy with think-alouds. This can be achieved by displaying one writing sample on a chart or ELMO, and using that sample to model and discuss how to revise the paper in a way that would improve it.

3. Provide guided practice with feedback. This can be done through peer editing and through meaningful teacher-student dialogue. These collaborative efforts reinforce the understanding that writing is a social process in which a message is created for an audience.

4. Gradually work toward independent mastery by students.

Peer editing is a very successful way to help students develop revision skills. This is particularly true when the peer groups have explicit goals for the revision. For example, find one place in the writing where the message is unclear, or one place where a different vocabulary word could be used.

Many teachers use checklists and mnemonic devices to help students revise their writing. Here are a few examples:

It's important to help students focus on more than sentence-level revisions. The 6 + 1 Trait writing program encourages a bigger-picture revision process through attention to ideas, organization, voice, word choice, and more. Their revision checklist includes items such as:

Although it's rarely considered this way, revisions include any changes a writer makes to a draft, including decisions made both before the writing begins and as drafting is taking place. Strategies that engage students before writing begins - for example RAFT and the story sequence strategy - can help students develop a strong first draft.

These steps for revision can be used across content areas. The types of writing that could take place include writing the steps to a word problem (math), reporting results from an experiment (science), and summarizing an important historical event or figure (social studies).

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It's an important part of the writing process. Revising gives students an opportunity to reflect on what they've written. Revising is a way to learn about the craft of writing. Revision is closely tied to critical reading; in order to revise a piece conceptually, students must be able to reflect on whether their message matches their writing goal.

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Elementary

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The concept of editing can be a tricky one to teach to elementary students who are just beginning to stretch their wings as writers. But as I like to remind my students whenever they make that face (you know the one), the editing process isn't about pointing out what's wrong with their writing. It's about making their wonderful writing even better.

These are a few of my favorite classic strategies for teaching elementary students about editing and revising, along with some ideas on how to make them as fresh and engaging as possible. These work best when paired with effective writing strategies and can be used separately or in tandem-whatever works best for you and your students!

Strategy #1: Check That List!

Editing checklists are standard when it comes to teaching elementary students about revising their work-and for good reason. They're as simple to create as they are to use, and they help keep the whole process organized and focused. To use an editing checklist strategy effectively, it's best to wait at least a week or so between the initial writing assignment and the revising session, so that your students can look over their work with a fresh perspective. Asking them to review their own work this way is an especially effective way of showing them how first drafts are often not the best drafts and why editing is such an important part of the writing process.

Of course, just handing out a list of writing elements to check off one by one can be a little, well, boring. To spice things up a bit and keep your students' attention from wandering, try:

Listing in the first person. Simply listing elements like "clear conclusion" to check off one by one can make the editing exercise feel tedious. Instead, try using more personal phrasing, such as, "My conclusion is clear." The difference is subtle, but it's there.

Adding a visual element. Illustrations, as you know, are your friends. You can match illustrations to individual assignments, such as black cats for Halloween or a snowflake for winter, or simply go for a multi-use writing theme, such as quills, ink bottles and books.

Turning it into a game. Instead of calling it a checklist, make it sound like a scavenger hunt. They're reading through their own writing searching for each item on the list. If they can't check an item off, they can rewrite until they're able to check off the whole list!

Highlighting an end goal. Editing for the sake of it might feel a bit discouraging to your students. Giving them a reason to want to improve their writing-whether it's to impress their parents during a class reading session or to polish it up before it's published in a book-will help make revising seem less like a chore and more like an opportunity.

Strategy #2: Playful Peer Editing

Peer editing is a wonderful method for teaching editing strategies to elementary students. Not only are they learning about writing and revising, they're also learning important people skills, including how to both give and receive constructive criticism with grace. Plus, they get to read something new and interesting, instead of just rereading their own work!

Of course, it can be difficult, especially for younger students, to grasp the real value of learning to edit well and how it benefits both the classmate they are editing for and their own writing. Some great ways to make peer editing more engaging include:

Adding a playful touch. Combine peer editing with the "scavenger hunt" checklist idea and turn it into a competition. Ask your students to divide into groups and first revise their own work using a checklist. Then, have each group deliver their assignments to another group and edit each other's work. At the end of the editing session, return papers to their owners and have each group add up how many errors were found in all of their assignments combined. The group with the lowest number of errors wins!

Making it official. Help your students make believe they're professional editors helping a soon-to-be-famous author polish up their work before it goes to print. Get some fancy-looking pens from a dollar store and hand them out only during editing sessions. Ask them to place their writing assignments in envelopes and pretend they are mailing them to their editors for review. And, to really make it official, be sure to publish your students' final work in a professionally bound classbook!

Strategy #3: Learning by Literary Examples

If your students ever doubt the value of editing, remind them that all of their favorite authors-not to mention the writers behind every single movie or TV show they've ever watched-do it too. Teaching elementary students editing through literary examples is the perfect way to build up critical reading writing skills at the same time. It's also a fantastic reminder that while nobody is perfect, with a little elbow grease and some polish, you can always improve.

But don't stop at just comparing and analyzing the works of the masters. To get the most out of teaching by literary example, try:

Getting inspirational. Find kid-friendly quotes from the greats about revising and editing and use them whenever you can-reference them in assignments, hang them on the walls, even ask your students to look some up on their own and choose a favorite!

Finding real examples. Maybe your students just can't imagine Dr. Seuss or J.K. Rowling ever having to revise their work. So find some proof! Show them real scans of manuscripts filled with notes, words crossed out and words to add, like the pages shared on children's book author Mary Amato's website that are intended specifically for use in the classroom.

Editing as someone else. To add a narrative element to revising, ask your students to pick an author they are familiar with. Have them imagine that are that author, and then edit and comment on their own work as they imagine that author would. Complete the game by making their imaginary status of published author official and publish their work in an anthology-style classbook.

Editing as a Stepping Stone to Publication

The most important part of teaching your elementary students about editing is context. Giving them reason to revise beyond the obvious-that it's a school assignment and that therefore they must do it-is key to motivating them to do their best work. While doing your best should be its own reward, when teaching young students such abstract concepts, sometimes something a little more concrete is needed to help illustrate the point.

Perhaps the best way to accomplish this is by teaching editing strategies as part of a larger lesson plan about the publication process. By guiding your students from first draft through revisions to actual publication in a real book, you'll help them better understand the value of hard work and the necessity of revising. Plus, becoming published authors will boost their confidence, both in themselves and in their own writing, while at the same time showing them how being open to constructive criticism can help them do their best-in writing and in life!
For more free resources to help your students become better writers (and editors!), be sure to check out our online teacher's lounge, and sign up today for your free publishing kit!

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3 Effective and Engaging Editing Strategies for Elementary Students

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The concept of editing can be a tricky one to teach to elementary students who are just beginning to stretch their wings as writers. But as I like to remind my students whenever they make that face (you know the one), the editing process isn't about pointing out what's wrong with their writing.

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I don't know about you, but I've had some serious woes when it comes to teaching my students to edit their writing. Many, many times I've had a student tell me that their draft is done and that they've looked it over for mistakes. Then, when I look over it, I find countless capitalization, spelling, and punctuation errors! I've found this to be true even for students who have been taught those skills for several years in a row.

It's hard for young writers to see mistakes in their writing, even when those mistakes may be obvious to us. Teaching students to edit not only involves teaching them capitalization, punctuation, and spelling rules, but also giving them strategies to help them "see" errors.

As I promised in last week's post on teaching revising, today I'll be discussing strategies for teaching editing. I hope you'll walk away with at least one new idea to try out in your classroom!

1. Teach editing in context, rather than through isolated grammar exercises.

Were you forced to diagram sentences in school? I was. Truthfully, I never figured out how to do it very well, but somehow I've managed to become a passable writer (I think, anyway...you tell me :)).

Clearly, there's a disconnect between isolated grammar exercises and using proper grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling in the context of real writing. And I've seen this disconnect firsthand with my students.

A couple of years ago, when I was teaching second grade, I had two students who LOVED fixing incorrect sentences. We hardly ever did sentence fixing, but when we did, they were jumping out of their seats to show me mistakes!

Ironically, those two students were the same ones who were consistently forgetting to capitalize "I," the first word in a sentence, and include periods in their writing. And since they were in second grade, they'd been taught those skills for almost 3 years at that point.

The bottom line is (and this is backed by research), editing needs to be taught in the context of real writing, not through disconnected grammar drills. Grammar drills are not only boring for many students, but they do not result in students using writing conventions correctly in their own writing.

So what do you do instead? Teach editing skills in context. And show students examples of correct use of conventions, rather than incorrect sentences. After all, we want them to imitate correct writing!

Let's imagine that you want to teach your first grade students how to use commas in a list.

This skill fits perfectly into a how-to writing unit, so you plan to teach it during that unit.

To get started, you select a published, how-to mentor text that has a list of supplies the reader will need. (Example: To build a kite, you will need tissue paper, string, glue, scissors, and 4 straws.)

Read the mentor texts to your students in its entirety, and discuss the ideas with your students. You want the focus of the first read to be comprehension.

Then, later that day or on another day, bring the text back and show students how the author uses commas in a lis t. Use a document camera to enlarge the text so that students can see it clearly. Discuss the effect that the use of commas has on us, the readers (i.e., we can clearly see each item and understand what is needed for building a kit).

Next, engage in some guided practice with students. This could take the form of them helping you write a list of supplies for a how-to book you are modeling for them. If you use my K-2 Revising and Editing toolkit, you will have kid-friendly how-to texts that you can use for exactly this purpose.

Last, have students try this skill out in their own writing. Have them take a finished or partially completed piece of how-to writing and add a list of supplies (with commas).

Pretty simple, right? Use real texts and have students use the concept in their own, real writing. This strategy makes editing skills "stick" for students.

Of course, not all of your students will have mastered using commas after this lesson! You'll probably have to repeat this a couple of times with different texts and different genres of writing.

And there'd certainly be nothing wrong with having them do a few comma-inserting exercises to follow up on that skill ( my writing units do just that, in fact). Just make sure to prioritize showing students correct usage in real mentor texts, and then having them apply those skills to their own writing.

2. Provide students with clear criteria to use when evaluating their writing.

If we want our students to go back and fix mistakes in their work, we have to clearly tell them what mistakes they need to look for!

The Common Core language standards are a great resources for finding out which editing skills students need to know in each grade level (keep in mind that they are cumulative, so you will likely need to review skills taught in grade levels below yours).

Once you are clear on what you want your students to be able to do, you can create rubrics and checklists to support them with editing. My K-2 Revising and Editing Toolkit has rubrics and checklists that are just for editing, as well as rubrics and checklists that integrate both revising and editing.

As I mentioned in last week's post, it's super important to spend time teaching each part of a rubric to students. Do lots of modeling and thinking aloud, so that they really learn how to use the rubric as a tool. You can cut apart the strips of the rubric to really break it down and make it "digestible" for young students.

In addition to using rubrics and checklists, another great way to provide students with clear criteria is through an editing flip book.

The purpose of this flip book is to give students a reference tool that encourages them to edit one piece of work multiple times.

Here's how it works:

Under each flap, guide them through writing the rules that they've learned in each area (C = capitalization, O = organization - handwriting and paragraphing, not content, P = punctuation, and S = spelling)

Have students keep the completed flip books in their writing folders. If you teach a new skill, have them add it under the corresponding flap.

When students are ready to edit a piece of writing, have them go through the flip book, one flap at a time. They should review what's under one flap, and then read through their work one time, looking ONLY for that type of mistake.

When students are finished, they should have read through their piece of writing FOUR times, looking for a different type of error each time (this helps them focus and find more mistakes overall).

Rubrics, checklists, and flip books all serve to provide clear criteria to our students, so they always know what they are expected to look for when editing their work.

3. Model, model, and model some more.

Students need to see you edit your writing and hear you think aloud as you edit. You can do this when you're doing any type of shared writing throughout the day - it doesn't have to take place during writing time!

My K-2 Revising and Editing Toolkit has kid-friendly mentor texts that you can use for this purpose. You can use the "correct" version of a text to go through and highlight correct punctuation and capitalization in the text.

You can also use the incorrect versions of the text (also provided) to model how you fix mistakes in the work (although again, I recommend placing emphasis on correct usage).

4. Have students get help from their peers.

I would bet that when you are writing something important, you like to have a friend look it over for mistakes. Right? Well, the same thing applies to our kiddos!

In last week's post, I talked about setting up a revising and editing table for your classroom. Please head over to that post to read more about how it works.

Basically, the revising and editing table is something you set up in your classroom during writing workshop time. It's a place where students go to get help with revising and editing their work. The best part is that you don't have to be providing that help! Once you teach the students how to use it and work together effectively, the table runs by itself.

When it comes to having students work on editing at the table, small sticky notes are a great tool. I never have students write directly on their friend's paper - that would not be showing respect to the writer. I also never have students make changes while they are sitting at the table, because that just takes up too much time.

Instead, what I have students do is write down notes about missing capital letters, missing periods, misspelled words, etc. on those small sticky notes. They can place the note directly on their paper and then go back and fix up their work at their seats.

Using a revising and editing table in my classroom made a HUGE difference for my students - they were much more likely to find and correct mistakes in their work! I really encourage you to try one out in your own classroom ( my K-2 Revising and Editing Toolkit has detailed instructions and lessons that you can use to introduce the table).

5. Use visuals as editing reminders.

My last strategy for teaching editing is one that applies to teaching almost any skill...using visuals! Kids forget things easily, but if we support them with visual tools, they will be more likely to use the skills we teach them.

The photo below shows a small binder ring with editing strategy cards. If there are 2-3 strategies you want students to really focus on, you can create these strategy card rings (differentiate as necessary), and give them to students to use during writing time.

A fun, visual way to recognize students for using good editing skills is to use Conventions Cards. These are simple cards that recognize students for using capital letters correctly, good handwriting, proper spelling, etc.

First, copy the cards onto colored paper. Explain what they are, and get students excited about them.

Then, while students are writing, walk around the room silently. Notice which students are using conventions correctly, and slide one of the cards onto their desks.

Not only does this acknowledge students who are doing good editing work, but it also encourages students around them to "clean up" their own work. Kids love getting these cards!!

To download the cards for free, click on the image below. My Toolkit also has additional options for Conventions Cards.

Conclusions

Phew, this was a long post! Thanks for sticking with me! To summarize, you can teach students to edit by:

Using published mentor texts as exemplars and having students try out writing conventions in their own writing (instead of using only grammar drills)

Providing students with clear criteria for editing

Doing lots of modeling and think-alouds

Having students engage in peer editing, and

Providing visuals to support students with their editing

Is there anything that you would add to this list? Please comment below! Or if you're already using my toolkit, let me know how it's going!

Happy teaching!

Resources

Graham, S., MacArthur, C. A., & Fitzgerald, J. (Eds.). (2007). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Morrow, L. M., & Gambrell, L. B. (Eds.). (2011). Best Practices in Literacy Instruction (4th ed.). New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). Common Core State Standards. Washington, DC: Authors.

Ruday, S. (2013). Five Recommendations for Teaching Common Core Grammar to Elementary Students. Larchmont, NY: Eye on Education.

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5 Effective Strategies for Teaching K-2 Students to Edit Their Writing - Learning at the Primary Pond

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I don't know about you, but I've had some serious woes when it comes to teaching my students to edit their writing. Many, many times I've had a student tell me that their draft is done and that they've looked it over for mistakes.