Editing... Blah

Editing is probably one of the most boring things for my kiddos to do. We don't edit all of our work, but we do edit pieces of writing that we want to publish. (This probably happens about once a month.) 


I had to find a way to jazz it up a little, and keep them responsible for their own editing. To do this, we do two things...


First, I have the kids circle evidence of whatever we are looking for that day. Today, we edited for capitals. So the kids had to go through their writing and circle all of the capitals they found with a red crayon. Then they had to ask themselves, "Does that capital belong there?" If not, they needed to edit it and fix it up. I've found by making them give me evidence by circling, they spend more time on this rather than glancing at their paper for about 10 seconds, then shouting "I'm done!!!!" We also look for sNeaKy capitals that are so sneaky and sneak into the middle of our sentences!!!


We did the same thing with punctuation. They circled all of the punctuation with blue and asked themselves, "Does that belong there?" 


Second, what's more motivating to a seven year old than a magnifying glass. We use these so they'll really pay attention and actually search for those capitals and punctuation. And it seems to help...they take it more seriously and take more time...

Here are some pics from our writing block today! 

He was super into using that magnifying glass. He took this job very seriously!!!

The (almost) finished product

Tomorrow we'll be checking for spelling. Hopefully, those kids that wrote "I think we should git a hermit crap fur ar class pet" will fix it up!!!


How do you help your little ones edit their writing purposefully??? I'd LOVE more ideas!!!

Tomorrow is Friday!!!! My favorite day of the week!!!!!

                                                                                       Source: bit.ly via Hector on Pinterest