“Today I’m going to teach you how to revise your nonfiction books by choosing a heading for each page”). In addition to using rubrics/checklists, we also need to teach our students specific ways that they can improve upon their writing.įirst, pick one specific revising strategy to teach (i.e. Something else you can do is to physically cut the rubric or checklist up into strips! You can then show students just one strip at a time, model how to use it to evaluate writing, and then give students that one strip to practice with their own writing.Ģ. Teach students specific revision strategies through the gradual release of responsibility. To help with this, I recommend including images or some kind of visual on your rubric (especially for students who aren’t reading yet). This photo shows a sample writing piece and rubric from my K-2 Revising & Editing ToolkitĪ rubric can be overwhelming to young students because there’s just so much text on it. You can use a sample piece of writing to think aloud as you use a rubric or checklist to rate it. When we introduce a rubric or checklist, we need to spend a significant amount of time modeling how to use it, so that it truly serves as a tool for our students. Using rubrics and checklists is a great way to communicate our expectations to students. Does their story need to have three parts? Does an opinion piece need 2 or more reasons to support the opinion? Kids need to know our expectations. We need to clearly communicate to our students what they should be striving for. Provide students with specific criteria to which they can compare their writing. In this post, I’ll share three different strategies that are a) supported by research and b) have worked well for me!ġ. So how do we accomplish this? During my time in the classroom, I’ve tried quite a few different things to get my Kindergarten, first grade, and second grade students to revise their writing. We want them to make changes that go beyond just fixing a misspelled word or putting in a period. We want them to think about word choice and sentence structure. We want our students to be able to consider whether or not the writing meets the needs and interest of their audience. Young writers need to learn that rethinking and reworking a piece of writing is a normal part of the writing process. But despite these challenges, it’s absolutely essential that we do teach our students to revise. Revising is difficult to learn and difficult to teach. Revising actually happens during and after the writing process, and we often do it more than once. You probably spend a few seconds thinking about what you want to say, compose a few lines, reread them, fix mistakes and do some rewording, and then plan out your next few sentences.Īs you can see from this example, you, as a proficient adult writer, don’t wait until your draft is finished in order to revise and edit. Think for a moment about how you write an email. And we often teach revising as just one step in the writing process, but it isn’t quite that simple in reality. This is because revising itself is such a complex process. Not only are some students reluctant to make significant changes to their writing, but revising can also be difficult to teach. Going back and reworking their writing is the last thing they want to do after they finally get their thoughts down on paper! Sometimes getting them to write a first draft is enough of a challenge. If your students are anything like the ones I’ve had, getting them to revise their writing is no walk in the park.
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