[nobe-l] Teaching writing

[Catherine Mendez]

I've spent the last 12 years teaching kindergarten and first grade in a public school with cited students. When I teach writing, I teach my students to read their work out loud to me. Including the punctuation. What's cool about this is that they usually catch their own errors, things like missing words or missing periods. To make sure that they are reading what's  actually on the page and not what they think they wrote, I ask them to touch each word as they read it back. I'm very strict about this, because a lot of times kids will think they've written one thing, and aren't looking closely at their work to realize that they've actually made mistakes. Sometimes their brains are moving faster than their pencils. 

As for spelling, if you know your students well you have a gauge of what they do and don't already know in terms of Word building. Some amount of incorrect spelling is to be expected with the lower grades, simply because they may be trying to write words they don't know. My expectation in the classroom is that if I have taught a particular spelling pattern, and the word they are writing fall into that pattern, they should spell it correctly. Inventive spelling is OK for other things. The way to check spelling is the same as checking everything else, have the student read out loud what they've written. 

You can also have them do peer editing. Often, students are much more critical of one another's work than they are of their own, or likely to catch mistakes. Of course, if you're going to set a peer editing, you need to set up simple protocols to make sure that both partners get equal time being edited, and that constructive criticism  remains within the bounds of courtesy. This can be done with a simple checklist.

Cayte

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