Writer's Workshop: editing

Today we talked about the 4th step in the writing process: editing. I introduced the class to our writer's eyeglasses bulletin board first thing. The students are being taught to use their "writer's eyeglasses" to look at their work a little more closely and fix some of the errors they might have made the first time.

I made these bookmarks to help students remember what information to look for during editing. We will add more to this as the year goes on, but for now I am mostly looking for editing of periods, capital letters, good spaces, and sentences that make sense and are in order.

During editing, students are allowed to use a red pencil to show what changes they made. We have practiced using some basic editing marks so we reviewed those by looking at an example page I wrote together. We went through the writer's eyes checklist one by one and fixed up each thing on the list.

After the students have attemped to edit their work on their own they sign up for a writing conference. To do this they simply move the clip with their number on it from the "I'm working hard on my own" sign to the "I need a writing conference" sign. I can then go down the ribbon and work with each student one on one to help them fix up their work to get it ready for publishing. This is a great opportunity for me to talk to each student one on one about their writing and their thought process.

Next up: publishing!